Everyone carries a unique identity, whether they know it or not. Every identity is special and unique from someone else’s. Identity cannot be specified as bad or good because it is simply an identity. No matter the circumstances, whether you are gay, a murder, or straight, we all have an identity. People get so caught up on the actions people do and labels those who do bad as” no bodies”. This is completely irrelevant because, like | said , everyone carries an Identity.
In the novel “ Everyday” by David Leviathan, there is a character who struggles so hard with an identity that assumption begin rising saying that the character might not even have an identity. The main character is A and he’s not your typical character, he’s more like a spirit and some may say demon. A has no one true identity, and if he did, it would be difficult for A to be labelized. While a particular reader tends to see A as male, another reader could just as easily see A as female. Another reader might choose to read A as transexual, and again be just as correct.
Overall, A is just too difficult to labelize. Although A may have a sense of thinking, he does not have an Identity due to him having no personal history, no love, and no physical persona. Many people may disagree with this, but A does not have an identity. Personal identity is described as the concept you develop about yourself that evolves over the course of your life. This may include aspects of your life that you have no control over, such as where you grew up or the color of your skin, as well as the choices you do in life, such as how you spend your time and what you make in life.
A does not qualify because he does not carry any of these qualities. A carries no personal history. The only thing A has is his mind. A mind does not simply make someone’s identity. Especially A’s. A doesn’t have any culture or background to rely his identity on. A states it himself. He says ” “I am a drifter, and as lonely as that can be, it is also remarkably freeing. I will never define myself in terms”(Leviathan, 7). A knows he is nothing but a mindful spiritual sort of like a conscious. A knows that every day is a new different day and he can’t build who he his because everyday he is someone new.
He is never settled in one family or one city he is always moving and changing bodies. Also due to his past of getting attached to someone, A doesn’t keep memories in tack. Without memories there is no history and without history there is no culture. This settles the fact that A does not have an identity The simplest thing that shows that A does not have an identity is the fact that he’s just a spirit or conscious flying around. But another reason that expands that is love. A isn’t identified as a gender, he solely identified by the actions he makes.
He lives his life knowing that the history he makes will be nothing but a memory as he moves on. He also can’t think of the future because he can’t predict anything due to the fact that everything he experiences is random. In the book A says, “Tam not blinded by the past or motivated by the future. I focus on the present because that is where I am destined to live. (Leviathan, 7)” A can’t have a history because of the fear of attachment he has. He also can’t live in the future because of the unexpectedness that awaits him. All he can do is live.
This may have changed when A fell in love with Rhiannon but we all know how that turned out. A couldn’t stay with Rhiannon because he knew that due to his unknown persona, he would not be able to live a normal life. This of course discourages all attachment and history which makes up a big portion of your identity. Love makes up a huge chunk of our identity. A can’t love anyone because if he does, he will end up changing the world and others life. This goes back to history. Without history, identity is impossible to form. In the book he states,” This is what love does: It makes you want to rewrite the world.
It makes you want to choose the characters build the scenery, guide the plot. The person you love to sit across from you, and you want to do everything in your power to make it possible, endlessly possible, And when it’s just the two of you, alone in a room, you can pretend that this is how it is, this is how it will be. (Leviathan, 175)” A knows that falling in love is dangerous because of the unexplainable future. If he decides to fall in love, he will fall in a rupture of loneliness and although he is already lonely he will become something less than what he already is.
The fact that A can’t love shows that he has no identity. Many may disagree, but love makes up identity. Loving someone can teach, expand who you are. Weather it is family or a partner, having love shapes who you are in a way that nothing else can. It expresses your true emotions as well as it gives you new outlooks and motives. When individuals gain positive aspects such as love, we term this as self-expansion. Self expansion can be described as relationships that open up new paths for you.
As you interact with roommates, close friends, and relationship partners in college, you will probably start to notice small parts of yourself changing to become a little more like them and vice versa. For example, you may have a roommate that likes sports but you don’t but overtime he influences you to watch it and then you begin to start becoming more like him. In the article,” Love and Acceptance as part of the Search for Identity and Purpose,” the author, Sherry McClurkin, she states,” As the ugly duckling learned, we find pure and true love and acceptance as well as identity and purpose through healthy relationships. McClurkin, 4)”. As oddly as this sounds this is extremely accurate. The book itself revolves around an ugly duck and due to his ugliness he believes that he has no part in the duck world. Throughout the story his family and friends begin showing him love and appreciation and due to that he become a bird with an identity. Although A may not have an identity, he does carry a mindset. He knows what is wrong from wrong and what he is. It may seem like he does have an identity, but he doesn’t because of the reasons I listed below.
A may have a sense of thought and a sense of who he is but the fact that he has no history attachment, love, or a physical persona simply eliminates the facts about him having an identity. A has a sense of thinking like any other human, but he doesn’t have a body or the history to portray his real self. According the University of Stanford,” Personal identity is sometimes discussed under the protean term self. And ‘self does sometimes mean ‘person. ” A is not a person. He is nothing. Although, near the end of the book, A meets some named Reverend Poole.
Reverend Poole isn’t your typical human being, he is someone like A. He is a mindset or spirit but the difference is is that he managed to stay in one single body. Although A and Reverend Poole are the same in the sense that they can travel bodies, Reverend Poole might actually have an identity. Reverend Poole is stuck in one body and due to that he can live a normal life, experiencing memories, love and making history. He is also physically there and due to this, he has identity. Reverend Poole proposes the same features to A but A declines. If A were to accept, he might have developed his own Identity.
Overall, A does not carry personal or any sort of identity. Although he may have a mindset, he does not posses the characteristic and qualities of what Identity really is. A is more like a spirit, roaming around the neighborhood he stays in and trying to find someone to comfort himself in. If he was to take the offer Reverend Pole presented, then that would be whole new argument. But due to him not having all the qualities identity poses, he simply is just a nobody. He can’t have history, culture, love, and isn’t physically there. This concludes that A has no identity.
