identity. The man without properties, Ulrich, has no last name, while the
stranger, Meursault, has no first name. Giving them a full name would be
tantamount to acknowledging that they have what they don’t have, a well-
defined identity.
Both Ulrich and Meursault are dispassionate and rather detached from the world
around them. Their stories are incomparable as regards plot, length, and
philosophical embedding. What allows them to be put next to each other is their
critical stance vis-à-vis modern ideas of subjectivity and identity, especially in
terms of nationality, race, culture, social class, and gender. Meursault is a
stranger to society who, in view of the insignificance of human affairs in the
universe, is ready to leave the world without regret. There is no destiny. Ulrich’s
story confirms just that. It takes place in a world where ‘sharp borderlines
everywhere became blurred’ and ends without an end, the search for identity
incomplete.
A few years later, in 1948, Irish writer Samuel Beckett published his play En
attendant Godot (the English translation of the original French is Waiting for
Godot, 1953) about an absent figure. In it two tramps hang around waiting for
one Godot who never comes. When Beckett was asked who or what Godot was,
he tersely replied, ‘if I knew, I would have said so in the play’. In the course of
the play, various characteristics of Godot are mentioned without making his
identity any less enigmatic. The question ‘Who is Godot?’ remains unanswered.
Yukio Mishima’s 1949 novel Confessions of a Mask grapples with another ill-
fated search for identity. The main protagonist, Kochan, is a young homosexual
who grew up in Japan’s era of right-wing ultra-nationalism. Confronted with
intersecting social and cultural norms that he cannot reconcile with his own
inclinations, he tries to fabricate an identity mask in order to fit in.
In our days, Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer (2015) is an illustrative
literary treatment of identity problems. The novel features a biracial double-
agent who ponders the inner conflicts of an exiled Vietnamese stranded in post-
Vietnam War California not being able to live his own identity in the sense the
term is used in an identity-obsessed society.
And then there is Cards of Identity, Nigel Dennis’s 1955 sardonic tale about the
‘Identity Club’. Its designated new president has this to say about it: