The Sole Author: Keisha's Identity through Existentialism (Revised)

Samantha Plate

Play In The City

10/27/2013

The Sole Author: Keisha's Identity through Existentialism

            Child birth was not quite what Keisha expected it would be. She had heard the stories of countless others. She seemed to think she might experience some sort of epiphany. Instead, Keisha experiences it almost from a third person perspective, detached and candid about the whole thing while under a haze of drugs. There is a sense that something is missing. And in fact there is, “the brutal awareness of the real that she had so hoped for and desired…failed to arrive” (Smith 323). She had been told it would be “like meeting yourself at the end of a dark alley” however giving birth is very uneventful for Keisha (Smith 323).

Throughout NW Keisha seems to be searching for something. She keeps looking for opportunities and ways in which she can define herself. Keisha even hopes that giving birth will be what she is looking for. She wants a life altering experience, one that is “large or brutal enough to disturb” what she calls “an image system at work in the world”, but “this moment never arrives” (Smith 322). There is one moment where “she almost thought she possibly felt it” (Smith 323). This ‘it’ being some sort of life changing moment in which Keisha ‘finds herself’. Where she can finally define her identity. What she gets instead in that ‘almost moment’ is a reminder that the “entity Natalie Blake” does not exist (Smith 324).

            This moment that Keisha is yearning for can be seen in Kierkegaard’s theories of existentialism. Keisha focuses a lot on “‘the difference between a moment and an instant’” (Smith 302). This idea, which Leah presents in their college years, follows Keisha into her adulthood where she finds the need to experience an ‘instant’. That moment where you have a realization that changes your life and it is so important that those few second must be called the “Fullness of Time” (Smith 303). Keisha is undergoing an existential crisis and has an incredibly strong need to define herself. She is troubled by the fact that she has no concept of herself. Keisha feels her personality is absent and cannot be defined the way she is able to define others. When Zadie Smith spoke to us, she also expressed this inability to define herself, which is easily relatable. We are able to see each other and point to their personality and say who they are, but we are unable to do this to ourselves. So is our human nature. Unfortunately, Keisha does not realize that she is not the only one who feels like she does and spends her life trying to find herself. She keeps creating different personas in hopes that one of them will really be her. She hopes that if she can experience a dramatic moment, during it her perception of herself will become clear and align with others’ perceptions of her, which she believes is the identity that she has created through Natalie.

It may be the ‘almost moment’ she experienced with Naomi’s birth that drives her to have another child. However Spike’s birth is also lacking a moment of self-realization.  It is after her children are born and she still has not experienced the ‘fullness of time’ that Keisha begins to contribute to the listings, in some strange hope of finding something in that alternate life that she could not find in her own. Since her persona of Natalie does not seem to be fitting, she reverts back to Keisha, but changes herself to fit the stereotype of what she should have become. Someone that may resemble her sister Cheryl to some extent. Keisha tries being the person society had expected her to be based on her childhood, to see if that fit her better than the life she created for herself. Again her plan fails and Keisha ends up destroying her life as Natalie in the process.

Keisha continues her search, and hopes to finally find what she is looking for with the only person she has ever had a dramatic event with, Leah. NW ends with the two women forcing themselves into a situation where they really have no place. They try to convince themselves they are doing the right thing by calling the police. But it is clear that Keisha knows she is not turning Nathan in for the sake of justice. The women want the excitement of being involved in something big. It is by potentially ruining Nathan’s life that Keisha hopes to find meaning in hers. Both the women revert back to their childhood, back to the time when they best friends, and were happy just being themselves. What Keisha truly wants is to go back to a time before the “breach” appeared “between what she believed she knew of herself, essentially, and her essence as others seemed to understand it”, before she “began to exist for other people” (Smith 208). It is by becoming those two girls on the phone who used to call boys and tease them that Keisha finally finds what she has been looking for. Her identity had been there all along; it was only by trying to define herself that she lost it in the first place.

All throughout NW Keisha struggles with the concepts of existentialism concerning the fullness of time and identity. She searches for a dramatic event to give her life purpose, and lets this drive her decisions. Keisha has a need to define herself the way she defines other people and tries to do this by constructing a new self. It is only through turning in Nathan that she is finally able to ‘meet herself at the end of a dark alley’. Who she finds lurking there in the dark is a little girl who is best friends with Leah Hanwell and has yet to question her identity, not thinking of herself as anything but Keisha Blake.

Works Cited

Smith, Zadie. NW. New York: Penguin, 2012. Print.

*Knowledge about Existentialism came from my ethics class lectures, readings, and discussions with Professor Payson.*