Identity

Throughout the novel, the author uses her main character Blandine’s dissociative experiences in order to consider the individual’s complex search for identity. In the opening chapter of the novel, “The Opposite of Nothing,” the narrator asserts that although Blandine “is only eighteen years old,” she has “spent most of her life” longing to exit her body (3). The narrator later reveals in the chapter “Variables,” that Blandine’s desire to transcend her childhood, her trauma, and her loneliness, has been augmented by her brief affair with her music teacher James Yager while attending St. Philomena’s. In the wake of this experience, Blandine, whose given name is Tiffany, “legally changes her name to Blandine, after a teenaged martyr who stoically endured public torture at the hands of the Romans” (118). The decision to change her name is in part inspired by her newfound obsession with the...