Identity and the Self

Throughout Constructing a Nervous System, the author uses a fragmented structure in order to enact her search for identity and the true self. The reader might refer to passages from the start of Chapter I in order to better understand this dynamic. Jefferson explains that for most of her adulthood, “I’d felt that to become a person of complex and stirring character, a person (as I put it) of ‘inner consequence,’ I must break myself into pieces—hammer, saw, chisel away at the unworthy parts—then rebuild” (4). Over the years, this personal work evolved for Jefferson. Once she realized the “edifice” of this self “was too fixed,” she became eager for “an apparatus of mobile parts. Parts that fuse, burst, fracture, cluster, hurtle and drift. I wanted to hear its continuous thrum. THRUM go the materials of my life. Chosen imposed, inherited, made up...