ABSTRACT
This chapter explains what depiction of identity was available from modern novels: both a modernist and an experimental realist novel have been taken as offering some answers to that question. Modern political theory has worked with a variety of selves-the autonomous rational chooser, the encumbered self, the self submerged in the larger political identity of the group, the self as citizen. The narrative construction of identity involves selection and representation and omission and non-representation and the resulting account may be ambiguous. Hillela's identity is naturally dependent on self-perception but is also in part a matter of ascription, dependent on the perception of observers. A Sport of Nature not only draws attention by its content to the range and expression of choice possible to selves constructing identities and the political outcomes that may result but the structural feature of narrative gaps represents a further potential destabilizing of identity inasmuch as they make the narrative account of that identity uncertain or incomplete.
