Content area
Full Text
Abstract. "I know who I am" is a commonplace phrase about ordinary identity. It also is a poem of sorts, expressive of something far beyond its few words. When Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote states it, the identity he fashions is clearly imagined but also, somehow, real. In this paper, I will critique and clarify this seeming puzzle. Doing so will help me to consider the role of self-fashioning in Don Quixote, as well as the idea that our own self-fashioned identities might be best understood not as "real" but as bound to the possibilities of a poetry of "who we are."
What does it mean to know who you are? Is it a matter of knowing your name? The things that you've done? The people you love? Such indispensible knowledge is somehow not enough; I can know all of these things, and still feel puzzled about who I am. "I am not the person I once was," "I am not myself today," and "I am learning who I am," are all commonplace poems of a kind: expressive sentences completely at home both in literature and ordinary life. Such a poem is the sentence "I know who I am." This last is one of the many grand and emblematic boasts of Miguel de Cervantes's hilariously self-fashioned knight, Don Quixote de la Mancha, a boast that can seem both impossible and yet utterly sensible, part quixotic and part mundane. Much as they are for the willful knight errant, my senses of who I am, and my articulations of those senses, can seem to exist somewhere between ordinary life and literary expression, and in some instances, perhaps even between the fictional and the real.
This last assertion is enigmatic, and I will attempt to clarify and assess it in what follows. Knowing who I am has something to do with the wider category of my identity, used here in an ordinary, nonlogical sense. This is the sense of identity, in Sydney Shoemaker's accounting, by which I might feel I have "identities," plural, that can, importantly, change.1 For example, I might mean all of my answers to the question "Who am I?" at certain times (I am a woman, a teacher, a daughter), and discard some, even...