Identity that transcends itself in A.L. Kennedy’s So I’m Glad and Original Bliss

Abstract

he paper focuses on the problem of identity in A. L. Kennedy’s novel So I’m Glad and the short storyOriginal Bliss. It argues that the structure of identity in the aforementioned works partly accounts for the ethics advanced in Kennedy’s work. At the centre of each work there is a romantically involved couple whose love stories offer interesting examples of a relationship between self and other. Kačkutė be­lieves that the other in Kennedy‘s writing is peculiar­ly positioned neither in or outside the subject, it cor­responds to Judith Butler’s idea of the constitutive outside that is brewed inside the subject. Either way such dialectics of the self and other results in a po­sitive identity development. Such change is marked by traumatic and physically painful experiences, but results in a cathartic moment that suggests the pro­found ethics underlying Kennedy‘s artistic project.