ABSTRACT
Locke engaged with the philosophical conundrum of defining personal identity as a phenomenon both persistent over time and distinct within space. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding addressed the first part as self-identification through memory and the second as bound by the human body. It bridged Cartesian duality with a third term ‘person’ to describe the continuous construction, reconstruction and representation of embodied consciousness. The word ‘representation’ however implies separation and duplication from that which is represented. Defoe’s literary creations are so often cursed and applauded as the benchmark for verisimilitude but their strategies of detailing, imitating and inventing real-world experience underline the problems and challenges of reading, believing and perhaps even realising deluded, deceptive and otherwise ambiguous representations of personal identity.
