Karol - Bend in The River -02/07

           The text makes a distinction between what is a personality and what is an identity. A personality is created out of reaction to circumstance. Characters like Indar wear their personalities like costumes. An identity is constructed as response to material being, a static and constant accretion of information that doesn't exist in past events or future hopefulness, it only is. Salim's self lies not his reactions to other selves but his response to and his flux displaced through them.
          When referring to Mahesh, Shoba, and Indar our narrator states: "The only friends in the town I had introduced him to were Shoba and Mahesh. They were the only people I thought he would have something in common with (b/c they were beautiful). But that hadn't worked. There was suspicion on both sides. These three people were in may ways alike- renegades, concerned with their personal beauty, finding in that the easiest form of dignity." (155)What the narrator sees as the power of their particular costumes as an aspect of identity is viewed inside of their triangle as threatening to each of their personalities. The characters are masked out of creation and out of sheer need for survival. The common thread of all their costumes, to the bewilderment of Salim, is that these personalities are created and not innate. Their suspicion towards each other is rooted in their distrust set upon while grappling with their own identities that aren't defined outside of reaction to environment.
          Salim is obsessed with whiteness of Yvette's skin which becomes a symbol of Salim's judgmental progression over her. He also appears to have a foot fetish but that could be intended to symbolize that he is always looking down in her presence. Overall, the author treats beauty as commodity. Interestingly enough, their foreignness becomes their commodity. The characters use beauty at first as currency until it consumes them. Salim seems to be using their beauty as currency to define himself. The selflessness he gains through Yvette is fleeting and illusory since his love for her involves a selfish favoritism for her and her alone. Here is what Zizek says on the selfishness of love: