Tuesday Flash Focus Chirps About Kathy Fish’s “Wren”

Sto­ries often con­cern them­selves with encoun­ters in which “one fash­ions one’s iden­ti­ty in a (large­ly neg­a­tive) encounter with some one oth­er” (Ruprecht 41). In oth­er words, often­times char­ac­ters can define them­selves not through attach­ment to pos­i­tive role mod­els, but rather through a process of nega­tion; e.g. I’m not crazy like him. Ten­sion emerges not only from the col­li­sion itself–think of the boy in Joyce’s “An Encounter” and his run-in with the “queer old josses”–but also from the real­iza­tion of shared traits with this “dark” Oth­er. The truth that the “mon­sters” of the world shape and mold our iden­ti­ty as much as the seem­ing­ly pos­i­tive, enlight­ened mod­els indeed might shake the foun­da­tions of many a read­er. Again, such forces define us by first remind­ing us what we are not and then lat­er show­ing us what we are.