SOURCE: Fickert, Kurt. “The American Character James Larkin White in Max Frisch's Stiller.” Monatshefte 79, no. 4 (winter 1987): 478-85.

In the following essay, Fickert investigates the nature of identity in Stiller.

The well-known opening sentence in Max Frisch's 1954 novel Stiller—“Ich bin nicht Stiller”¹—states that the protagonist, who is relating his own experiences, has been mistaken for a Swiss citizen named Anatol Ludwig Stiller and implies that he is someone else. He subsequently identifies himself as the American James Larkin White. The story he tells, in actuality a series of stories, has the purpose of establishing himself as this individual while at the same time he gathers as much information as he can about Stiller in order to disassociate himself from this stranger-self. The result of his endeavors, which fill seven notebooks and constitute the bulk of the novel, is his failure to convince anyone—the authorities, Stiller's relatives...