Identity Crisis in "Please Look After Mom," "Arabian Nights & Days," and "My Michael"

                In many of the works we’ve covered during the course of our Contemporary World Literature class thus far, the issue and crisis of identity has been a central theme, often contributing to relational and social issues that profoundly affect the characters.  The father in Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mom struggles with contentment and a feeling that he wants to be and experience something more.  Many of the characters in Nagib Mahfouz’ Arabian Night and Days struggle with the issue of identity as they find themselves engaging in acts that seem inconsistent with the identity they have created.  This identity crisis again exists in Amoz Oz’ My Michael, this time appearing in the form of Hannah’s false expectations and hasty actions.  In all of these stories, characters engage in actions harmful to themselves and others as the direct result of either the search for or the loss of identity. 

                While Please Look After Mom is, on the surface, the story of a wife and mother who disappears in a Souel subway station, the reader learns much more about the missing woman’s family than the woman herself.  Written in the second person with recipient of the narrator’s speech shifting between the woman’s surviving family members, a substantial portion of Pleas Look After Mom details the thoughts and actions of the husband and father whose wife has been lost in the subway.  It is quickly apparent that this unnamed father and husband is an incredibly conflicted man, struggling to meet the cultural expectations placed on him by Korean tradition while longing to escape in some way and be free of the bondage that is cultural and traditional responsibility.  “All you wanted in life was to leave this house,” says the narrator, “when you were young, when you were married, and even after you had children.  The isolation you felt whenever it struck you that you would spend your entire life in this house, in this dull town stuck in the south of the country, in the place of your birth – when that happened, you left home without a word and wandered the country.”  (130)  The father in Please Look After Mom is a suffocating character, a character whose perception of his own identity is so different from the identity given to him by his culture that he feels a deep need to act, often in seemingly harmful and irrational ways.  He abandons his wife and family in the attempt to close the gap between his reality and his imagined identity, trying desperately not to be the sort of person who lives in the dull little town of his birth.  His self-image is larger and more complex than this culture or circumstances allow for, but his actions to try and correct this problem invariably backfire, worsening his discontentment and sorrow.  “One winter night,” says the narrator, “you came home and your children had suddenly grown up.”  The father’s search for identity has destroyed his family and stolen away his chance to be a caring father, to be present in the lives of his children.

                Naguib Mafouz’ Arabian Nights & Days, a collection of stories focused mainly on the interactions between human beings and genies who tempt the protagonists to act strange and out of character, is also, in many ways, about the question of identity and how one’s identity affects one’s actions.  Sanaan-al-Gamali, a gentle-spirited merchant man who steps on a genie in the night and is asked to kill the governor , struggles with a profound and seemingly uncontrollable change in his actions and demeanor that lead him to question his own identity.  “All his feelings were charged with anger and resentment, while his nature deteriorated as though he were being created anew in a form that was at variance with his old deep-rooted gentleness.”  (15)  The encounter with the genie seems almost to steal away his identity, leading him to question the relationship between his identity and his actions and creating a sense of distance between his actions and his perception of self.  When Sanaan-al-Gamali, driven to a state of madness, rapes and murders a young girl, his loss of identity is so profound that that the event seems like an out-of-body experience.  “He was another person; the killer-violator was another person.  His soul had begotten wild beings of which he had no experience.”  (19)  Sanaan-al-Gamali’s actions are a testament to the danger of losing one’s sense of identity and acting outside of one’s principles and sense of self.  After choosing to obey the genie’s command to kill the governor, al-Gamali steadily drifts farther and farther away from the person he once was, and it seems that Mafouz intends to leave some question as to whether this profound change is the result of the genie’s manipulation or al-Gamali’s free choice.  Whether or not al-Gamali chooses his actions, however, Mafouz shows us just how controlling a crisis of identity can become.  It is a sort of snowball effect, difficult to reverse once set in motion.

                Amoz Oz’ My Michael tells the story of a marriage in crisis, a crisis that is, in many ways, similar to the martial struggle seen in Please Look After Mom and caused by the same sort of struggle with identity seen in both Shin’s novel and Mafouz’ collection of short stories.  Hannah, the wife of a quiet, reserved professor named Michael, struggles to reconcile the reality of her life with her idealized concept of self.  Hannah’s identity, it seems, is deeply rooted in circumstance.  She has constructed a life for herself, planning her life and her relationships in such a way that her value and her happiness depend on the fulfillment of those plans.  This is especially true as it pertains to her marriage, and the central conflict in the novel, one that exists within Hannah’s mind, is the lack of fulfillment she experiences when her plan succeeds.  “I had never wanted a wild man.  What had I done to deserve this disappointment?  When I was a girl I had always thought deep down that I would marry a young scholar who was destined to become world-famous.”  (48)  Michael is a scholar, a hard-worker, and a good man.  He is everything that Hannah hopes for and dreams of, yet she often finds him dull, cold, and boring.  She wishes that he would do something crazy, something out of the ordinary, yet he is always there, always steady, always the same, always Michael.  This discontent, for Hannah, is not only relational.  It is about something much more significant, even, that Michael.  For Hannah, the fact that the fulfillment of her imagined life leaves her empty and discontented calls into question her knowledge of self.  If her desires are fulfilled, yet she remains unhappy, the validity of those desires, of that ideal concept of her life and identity, is called into question.  Hannah struggles to figure out who she is, and as a result, she struggles to know what she wants.  It is this very struggle that continues to increase the emotional distance between Hannah and Michael until their marriage is merely a functional arrangement, devoid of any real passion, love, or devotion. 

                Though entirely different in setting and plot, these three works share the thematic element of identity crisis.  When human beings struggle to know themselves, their relationships and actions begin to deteriorate.   Self-knowledge and a well-formed sense of identity are crucial for a person to be whole and functional, and when some disruption or doubt occurs that affects one’s concept of identity and self, the results can be catastrophic.  The deterioration may be slow and subtle, but it is powerful enough to destroy families, create criminals, and cause unimaginable despair.