Identity

The author explores the individual’s search for identity in the short stories “Manifest,” “Breastmilk,” “Imagine Me Carrying You,” and “The Wonders of the World.” While each of these stories follows its own formal rules, all the main characters are searching for a sense of self. In “Manifest,” the second-person narrator becomes convinced that she is a “new horrible person” when her mother starts calling her by her late mother Agnes’s name (15). As the story’s title suggests, the narrator becomes so convinced that she must be as wicked as the late Agnes that she manifests this identity for herself. Once she starts to believe that her “life [is] a performance” she begins to perform an identity that is not in fact her own (15). By the story’s end, she decides that “There is no you here” because she has essentially become Agnes (21). Her experience...