Lecture 2

Chapter I: IDENTITY

Identity is obviously a dominant theme in the novel. It is an explicit one, the main one; it sets an emphasis on the relations of affiliation and paternity. This theme comes out clearly, if you sum up the plot: at the beginning, the hero is both an illegitimate child and an orphan. “With my father, however, all was a blank, both during and after.” (Page 4) “However” introduces the notion of blank. As a young man, he seems unable to find his own identity. This is symbolized mainly by passages where he wears someone else’s clothes: “That was how I came to inherit my predecessor’s overcoat. I found it eerie to walk around in it, knowing that it had belonged to a man who was now dead, but I continued to wear it on all our outings for the rest of the winter. To assuage my compunctions, I tried to think of it as a kind of uniform that went with the job, but that did not do much good. Whenever I put it on, I couldn’t help feeling that I was stepping into a dead man’s body, that I had been turned into Pavel Shum’s ghost.” (Page 116) Fogg is symbolically threatened by appearance. At the end of the novel, he seems to have discovered his identity; he has discovered who his father is, therefore he seems to know who he is. This is obvious in the last pages of the novel. Knowing who he is not reveals who he is. “I had left myself behind, that I was no longer the person I had once been.” (Page 297)
Moon Palace falls into the bildungsroman category. The moment of self-knowledge comes after months of torment. The theme of identity is also implicit in the way it is indirectly linked to the theme of wandering, walking, and traveling. There is a parallel progression if we take the theme of travel. At the beginning, Fogg wanders with no sense of direction. This aimless walking and wandering is a dominant motif. “I had no clear idea of what I was going to do. When I left my apartment on the first morning, I simply started walking, going wherever my