Chu T’ien-Hsin Identity

“Man of La Mancha” is a first-person narrative in which an unidentified speaker suffers an episode of arrhythmia and passes out. This experience causes an identity crisis that has the narrator obsessing over his future sudden death, how he will be identified, and what his belongings will communicate about who he is. Leaving the clinic and retracing his steps, the speaker becomes acutely aware of the place where he almost fainted. He imagines the reactions of people on the street if he had passed out in that spot, and assumes they would see him as “a beggar, a vagrant, or a mental patient, or maybe someone suffering from the effects of the plague, cholera, or epilepsy” (Chu 1745). Only once he is identified as wearing “more or less respectable attire” (1745) does an old man decide to save him, and ask the questions at the heart of the story: “Who are you? Who should we call? What’s the number?” (1745). The speaker has nothing in his wallet or in his bag that offers any clues as to who he is, and the idea that he could die and wind up an unidentified corpse, held at the city morgue indefinitely, terrifies him. Thinking more and more about the lack of meaningful artifacts left behind in his wallet, the speaker searches for small ways to reinvent himself, or rather, to create a trail of clues that would suggest his identity as more interesting and important than who he thinks he is. This deception is clearly indicated through the title of the story and direct reference to Cervantes’ character, Don Quixote. Chu’s narrator tells multiple stories about how the contents of a wallet, the objects left behind, and even the place a person happens to die can either clearly depict who they are, or completely misrepresent them. But those relics become the person’s identity. And so, rather than focusing on becoming the person he wants to become his legacy, the narrator creates a trail of clues, preparing for his death. The importance of identity in this story is not on who the speaker is, but on who he wants people to think he was when he is gone, while avoiding a legacy that is difficult for his partner to unravel, and not ending up anonymous, figuratively and literally.

Works Cited

Chu T’ien-Hsin. “Man of La Mancha.” The Norton Anthology of World Literature. Edited by Martin Puchner, Shorter 3^rd ed., vol. 2, W.W. Norton & Company, 2013. pp. 1744-1750.