ABSTRACT
Locke engaged with the philosophical conundrum of defining personal identity as a phenomenon both persistent over time and distinct within space. An individual may identify on different occasions with or apart from other group identities as in the examples of nations or families explored in The True-Born Englishman and The Family Instructor. Family and foreign origins and connections are broken, expunged, resurrected, invented and murdered in Robinson Crusoe, Captain Singleton, Moll Flanders and Roxana. This chapter examines Defoe's representation of personal identity as dissonance and rupture as individuals lay claim to their living presence. Soul-sleeping or mortalism was favoured from the sixteenth century as a potential alternative to Catholic purgatory. Defoe presents characters as though real and also demonstrates how such fictional persons acquire the dimensions and weight of presence. Personal identity or self-authorised individuality is the modern romance that cannot be unimagined. Defoe's characters work personal identity as an instrumental fabrication woven in with others' beliefs and expectations.
