The Human Stain By Phillip Roth

In Ralph Ellison’s novel The Invisible man, the unknown narrator states “All my life I had been looking for something and everywhere I turned someone tried to tell me what it was…I was looking for myself and asking everyone except myself the question which I, and only I, could answer…my expectations to achieve a realization everyone else appears to have been born with: That I am nobody but myself. But first I had to discover that I am an invisible man!” (13). throughout the novel, the search for identity becomes a major aspect for the narrator’s journey to identify who he is in this world. The speaker considers himself to be an “invisible man” but he defines his condition of being invisible due to his race (Kelly). Identity and race

Identity is what defines people. It is every aspect of life that range from culture to religious beliefs, friends and family, every of it makes a piece of an individual’s personal identity. In fact, it is completely normal for people to feel lost while searching for their identity. Washington Irving, America’s first writer, is best known by his famous short story “Rip Van Winkle” which emphasizes in the struggle of finding a new identity after the American Revolution because of the characters that appear, the symbolism, and the setting where the story is placed.

person. Without an identity people would not know what kind of person they are. The book

Human beings have full control over their identities after they have received knowledge and have become shaped from external stimuli. These stimuli include the teaching process of humans which comes through tradition, schooling, and the actions of other humans and the influence of the organisms around them. Andrew Solomon, through “Son,” was able to use his experience of growing up and labeling himself as a gay dyslexic to show how his environment and knowledge had shaped his identity and how it was viewed by others with different identities. In “An Elephant Crackup,” Charles Siebert was able to explain how the other organisms or humans are able to form new identities for elephants over time by shaping them a new environment and having the elephants process it. In “Mind’s Eye,” Oliver Sacks had different case studies of blindness from different people and was able to show how each one experienced their blindness help shape and express their individual identities. The stimuli that becomes processed by a person in the situations, accounts, and studies of these works assist in the role of explaining the formulation of an identity.

James Weldon Johnson author of The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man discusses the issue of race and identity in his short story. Writing in first person Johnson follows the unnamed protagonist from childhood up to adulthood, he demonstrates in different areas how this unnamed man handles his identity and his race as colored. The fact that he remains nameless throughout the story shows more of the connection between identity and race. During the course of the story Johnson’s protagonist makes the argument that identity is highly based upon the race of the individual. His journey from adolescence to adulthood as a colored man seems to play a keen role in the jobs he makes and the people he interacts with, ultimately defining his identity based on his race.

Our identities are key to our understanding of the world. Mental models through which information is processed are built off of life experience, taught ethics and morals, and upbringing. Identity is discussed in the following texts - The Politics of Exile by Elizabeth Dauphinee, “Unlearning the Myth of American Innocence” by Suzy Hansen, and “Letter to America” by Aida Hozic - through various themes of American culture. Dauphinee, in particular, examines the depth of personal identity and its ability to change. All three works consider the many components of personal identity and its formation as well as its undoing.

In philosophy, the issue of personal identity concerns the conditions under which a person at one time is the same person at another time. An analysis of personal identity

A person’s identity is unique from another individual’s and is shaped by a plethora of aspects, some being family, friends, culture, personal interests, environment, and society. These aspects all come together to influence a person’s identity, some having a more powerful impact on an individual than others. However, when a person is put into an environment or situation in which their perceived identity does not match those of their environment or society, the individual is now in isolation from his or her surroundings. During isolation, a person may struggle to find their true identity or remain true to their identity. This phenomenon is perfectly shown in the novels Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky and Brave New World by Aldous Huxley,

Already I can tell that this book is more difficult than most other novels I have read. It seems as though Roth is in favor of using long sentences and complex vocabulary. I sometimes had to reread sentences a few times because there was difficult vocabulary I needed to look up and the sentences were long. I needed to read each sentence piece by piece to make sure I could understand what the author wanted to convey to the reader. Although the text seemed overwhelming when I read the first few pages; once I began reading sentences in increments I could more easily understand the text.

After investigation, the loss of identity becomes apparent after reading about the horrors of slavery. The slaves were servants to a master and had no way of learning the structure and foundation of what it

There are many well-known works that deal with social issues in America during the late 19th century. Of those many, Philips Roth’s ‘The Human Stain’ is one of the most famous, a novel that deals with the issue of racism in America and how many blacks pass in whites because of advantages and privileges that the whites had during that time in America, especially Jews. The author of the novel represents this phenomenon through his main character of the novel Coleman Silk, who is a light skinned boy from a black family, who lives in New Jersey, and decides to present himself as a white Jew and hide his real origin. Conversely, this was a big decision, and of course with a lot of responsibilities for a twenty years boy. Creating a new identity

Identity can be construed as the differentiating character or personality of an individual. In the gothic romance novel, The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne tells a tale of sin in a 17th century Puritan community and explores the theme of identity in characters Hester Prynne, Pearl Prynne, Arthur Dimmesdale and Roger Chillingworth. Throughout the novel, Hester, Pearl, Arthur and Roger cope with the consequences of public and private shame. In Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, the theme of identity is ubiquitous as Roger Chillingworth, Hester Prynne, Pearl Prynne and Arthur Dimmesdale all form new identities as they cope with the consequences of sin.

LGBTQ social movements have evolved over time from liberationist politics of the 1970s to an enormous contemporary focus on gay and lesbian marriage rights, a controversial and arguably assimilationist priority for mainstream LGBTQ advocacy groups. Different forms of activism have approached assimilationism versus societal reformation or preservation of unique constructions of queer identities with a myriad of arguments. In “The Trouble with Normal” by Michael Warner, the author focuses primarily on a criticism of gay marriage rights activism in which he posits that all marriage is “selective legitimacy.” He points to other LGBT movements and issues as more worthy of pursuing, particularly intersectional pursuits of equal rights for people regardless of coupled status. In “Marital Discord: Understanding the Contested Place of Marriage in the Lesbian and Gay Movement” authors Mary Bernstein and Verta Taylor give a snapshot history of LGBTQ activism since the 1970s and offer similar arguments as Warner about the heteronormative and neoliberal nature of placing the fight for legal marriage rights at the forefront of LGBTQ activism, although they do also introduce emerging improvements with the increasingly intersectional awareness of modern advocacy efforts.

For my report I chose to look at the loss of Identity portrayed in a range of different literature. The texts that I chose to study were: ‘Wide Sargasso Sea’ by Jean Rhys, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘I am not Esther’ by Fleur Beale, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ by Oscar Wilde and ‘Face Off’ directed by John Woo and written by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary. In all five texts that I studied the theme “loss of identity” was apparent, and in every case the main characters are the ones that experience a loss of identity. In ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’ and ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ the main characters lead a

Many modern literary texts revolve around this concept. Michael Hogg and Dominic Abrams explain,“Identity as people’s concepts of who they are, of what sort of people they are, and how they relate to others” (Hogg and Abrams,p. 2). Staurt Hall defines , “Identity is a process, identity is split. Identity is not a fixed point but an ambivalent point. Identity is also the relationship of the Other to oneself” (Hall, pp 9-20). Alexander Wendt observes identities are “relatively stable, role-specific understandings and expectations about self” (Wendt, p. 397). The present paper analyses the journey of Tilo who assumes new names with new identities in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s The Mistress of