Native Speaker by Chang-Rae Lee -- My Critical Response to a Quote

I turn but do not extricate myself, Confused, a past-reading, another, but with darkness yet. --Walt Whitman from the Epigraph to Native Speaker

Critically comment on the following: “I am to be a clean writer, of the most reasonable eye, and present the subject in question like some sentient machine of transcription. In the commentary, I won’t employ anything that even smacks of theme or drama” (203).

Henry’s thoughts in the sentences above indicate how he will write the notes that he sends back to Dennis Hoagland about John Kwang. “I” refers to the protagonist Henry--both his and our “I”dentity--and carries with it all of the details in the book that as narrator he voices. The “I” also relates to what the other characters think of Henry. The tone and meaning in the philosophical musings of the prose in certain chapters’ concluding paragraphs characterizes these attributes into the “I.” Additionally, the “I” relates to Henry’s identification with his job, and to the meaning of “I” within the entire context of the book. Finally, to some extent, the “I” relates to the qualities of the author that enabled Lee to write the character behind the “I,” and the “I” relates, as well, to the reader’s identification with Henry.

The sentences as a whole imply an intelligent, objective rendering, such as a “sentient machine,” or what a video camera-recording of a person’s life might convey rather than an interpretation (203). Henry goes on to state that “he will simply know character. Identity. That is all” (203). The rest of the chapter then describes how Henry appears to be an accomplice to the unstated murder of Luzan. The quote above is Henry’s moment of clarity; his realization that he is a destroyer of people that he identifies with. The sentences also contain a bit of anger over having to resolve the conflict within himself as an intelligent but emotionless machine.

To me, the value of the book is that it documents the mind’s identity function and those that manipulate it, including oneself. Lee explicates “identity” through the use of metaphor later in the chapter during the narration of the last meeting with Luzan. The unstated harm to Luzan as a psychologist, one who understands identity more than others, suggests that killing an understanding of identity--unmasking--results in the sense of guilt. It also suggests that Lee by way of reader identification with Henry wishes his audience to know that. Although Henry does what he does because it is his duty to his job, and thereby part of his identification, Henry also identifies with Kwang’s “leap of . . . character” by which he recreated his identity as an “American” (210-11). The value in the sentences being analyzed as it relates to the rest of the chapter is that it presents the rise of morality within an identity, an individual, to a greater level of consciousness by way of conflict-of-character, which often during the coming to consciousness transition phase carries with it the weight of guilt. Thus the understated guilty tone of the quote implied through the use of the word “smacks” carries with it the burden of consciousness.

I believe that the point that Lee makes is that metaphorically killing somebody (and I don’t know for sure if Luzan or Kwang dies) is true of everyone in that a person takes what is unknown about someone and molds it into what they see whenever they meet somebody--the first impression. They kill the real by bringing it close to them, by forming concepts, impressions, which have nothing, or only a symbolic relationship to the actual “identity” of a person. And further, that “identity” is a construct subservient to the identity function which provides for human relatedness and survival. Henry encounters conflict because of his inability to justify his identity as moral, because of what he has done, and chooses to reduce the human relationship overtones--“anything that smacks of theme or drama”--out of the narration that he sends back to Hoagland. He wishes not to be a part of a moral crime against Kwang. But we cannot censor away the injustice that we do to others during our interpretation of them. The rise of morality within us avails us not of that weight. We cannot free ourselves from guilt by merely reporting to ourselves this is who they are, and this is who we are. Identity, since it is a product of a psychological function, may only be known indirectly through constructs, even to ourselves, but the identity function may be strengthened to produce a more dynamic and fulfilled personality.

The Henry character as spy, son (including inherited traits), father, husband, and partner in Native Speaker epitomizes identity but the way that Henry’s identity/personality matures though tragic events in a poetic roundabout manner prove that the identity function is more than a matter of identity. During partial complex seizures, people experience the loss of the identity function, and they enter into a state of fight or flight. In the quote of our analysis, in addition to a sense of resignation in regard to a moral choice and a sense of frustration over having to submit to duty, the reader also senses a bit of fight or flight from not knowing which way Henry will turn as his identity, his symbol producing system, his terministic screen, is threatened.

Although the identity function is objectively undefinable and our opinions of others and ourselves necessarily biased, by morally carrying that, let us say knowledge of not knowing, that “darkness yet,” we may build more conscious and meaningful relationships (Whitman). In the previous chapters, Lee’s exposition of identity separates many of the masks from the individual characters to show that a person’s identity is unstable and dependent on constructs. But, identity is also much more than that because it may be shaken when the masks are removed and a person is left with an identity in relationship to another as indicated in the last paragraph of questions about describing Kwang: “Where are you to begin, and where are you able to end?” (211). It is the human connection between Henry and Kuang out of which the morality of Henry as an individual is questioned juxtaposed to a hypothetical “sentient machine” narrative of Kwang’s identity that Henry’s boss wants to know. So, a mature identity, the more real manifestation of the identity function which cannot be fully known may be partially understood as a moral relationship to another and by reflection on the loss of that sense of identity when human relatedness ends.