Taking a look at the essay “The Other Question” and the book The Heartsong of Charging Elk, there’s really a lot to see and learn about identity. In “The Other Question”, the idea of the otherness and unconscious are linked with identity. These ideas work very well with this story, because essentially the character has lost most of his ideas of his identity. He is in a new land of Europe where people dress, talk, and function differently they he does. He is a complete outsider. He has trouble trying to get help while in the hospital because he cannot speak the language. The only comfort the character has is dreaming and thinking about his previous life.
The flashing back and forth between memories and present is very interesting in this book. It really helps make an emotional attachment to the character. He knows who he was in his past life, but there’s a void or unconscious period of his life that he cannot recall, (the accidents that put him into the hospital). He really doesn’t know how he came to his present state and doesn’t understand the land that he is in. The character is forced to change his identity to try to communicate and survive.
In the essay, the author discusses a point of unconscious pole of colonial discourse. This is really demonstrating how power and impact are lost to a person when they suffer a trauma such as Charging Elk did. The alienation and fear brought about by the event have a higher bearing over anything else the character knew from his previous life. It is this fear and alienation of his people, language, country and dress, that Charging Elk is forced to at least try to remember and understand where he is. He essentially is forced to assimilate by fear and alienation, which is very interesting.
In what we have talked about so far in class with identity, there was never a character that was placed in such a fearful situation as this one. With what is basically amnesia, the character is really left with no identity and his surroundings do not match anything he recalls or knows in identity. This crisis gives a whole new spin on the importance of identity and what it means to a person, but also the importance of a person being willing and able to change their own identity for survival and to fit in culturally.
This situation is much more unique them the others we have read about previously, but at the same time similarities can still be seen in how the character is left in a space of unknown identity. In other stories, such as Drown and Blu’s Hanging, the characters identities are being forced to change because someone left them alone without help, or notice. The same is true for Charging Elk. He is left alone by all the showmen in the Wild West Show. He knows no one in a new land and is isolated and alienation. Seeing this similarity with other stories brings up the question of whether or not isolation and alienation are key factors to a person being forced to question and change their identity and have to assimilation to new ideas and cultures.