Story: A Soldier for the Crown

"You always were a gambler.
Before the war broke out, when you were still a servant in
Master William Selby’s house, you’d bet on anything—how early
spring thaw might come, or if your older brother Titus would
beat your cousin Caesar in a wrestling match—and most of the
time you won. There was something about gambling that you
could not resist. There was suspense, the feeling that the future
was not already written by white hands. Or finished. There was
chance, the luck of the draw. In the roll of dice or a card game,
there was always—what to call it?— an openness, a chance that
the outcome would go this way or that. For or against you.
Of course, in bondage to Master Selby there were no odds.
Whichever way the dice fell or the cards came up, you began and
ended your day a slave.
But did you win this time?
Standing by the wooden rail on a ship bound for Nova Scotia,
crammed with strangers fleeing the collapse of their colonial
world—women and children, whites and blacks, whose names
appear in Brigadier General Samuel Birch’s Book of Negroes—you pull
a long-shanked pipe from your red-tinted coat, pack the bowl with
tobacco, and strike a friction match against a nail in your bootheel.
You know you are fortunate to be on board. Now that the Continental
Army is victorious, blacks who fought for the crown are struggling
desperately to leave on His Majesty’s ships departing from New York
harbor. Even as your boat eased away from the harbor, some leaped
from the docks into the water, swimming toward the ship for this
last chance to escape slavery. Seeing them, you’d thought, That might
have been me. But it wasn’t; you’ve always been lucky that way, at
taking risks. Running away from bondage. Taking on new identities.
Yet you wonder what to call yourself now. A loyalist? A traitor? A
man without a country? As the harbor shrinks, growing fainter in the
distance, severing you forever from this strange, newly formed nation
called the United States, you haven’t the slightest idea after years of
war which of these names fits, or what the future holds, though on
one matter you are clear:
From the start, you were fighting for no one but yourself"

QUESTION:
Lines 20–35: What references are there in these lines to the ambiguity (the uncertainty created when the writer leaves things open to interpretation) of the main character’s identity?