Speech monster : language and identity in Chang-Rae Lee’s native speaker

Abstract EN

This paper explores the links between language and self in Chang-rae Lee’s Native Speaker.

Utilizing Mikhail Bakhtin’s insights on the linkages between speech and context in constructing relations between the self and others, as well as concepts such as polyphony and heteroglossia, I will argue that Lee deploys discursive strategies that illustrate the narrator’s failed attempts to define his identity through language.

Although the narrator resists attempts by others to define him, he unwittingly falls into various forms of self-essentializing before arriving at the conclusion that the self is ultimately unknowable.