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mind, but it has originated from the author’s ‘stream of consciousness’, and therefore believable and qualified.
Moreover, Murphy also names some means of characterization that writers often use. The means of description include: Personal description a
person’s appearances; character as seen by another through the eye and opinions of another; speech through what the person says; past life letting
the reader learn something about a person’s past life; conversation of others the things they say about him; reactions how a person reacts to various
situations and events; direct comments, and thoughts Murphy, 1972: 161- 171. Most writers seldom use these means individually, but blend them
skillfully, so that the reader “carried along by the stream of the narrative” is often unaware of the means being used Murphy, 1972: 173.
2. Postcolonial Theory
I focus my utilization of postcolonial theory for scrutinizing Arjun’s re- negotiation of Self. Therefore, main body of the theories are related to
postcolonial identity and some theories of colonial discourses.
a. Postcolonial Identity
According to Bhabha in The Location of Culture 1994; Routledge ed. 2004, in the postcolonial text the problem of identity returns as “a persistent
questioning of the frame, the space of representation, where the image… is confronted with its difference, its Other” Bhabha, 2004:66. The need for
knowledge of such ‘frame’ then leads him to a concept of writing.
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Bhabha’s statement of writing identity, or the strategy of doubling, tries to revise any understanding of identity whose basis is self-consciousness,
which in his terms becomes the ‘vertical dimension’ of identity, the dimension of depth. This depth is a common language of identity to measure the Self,
hence as far as this consciousness can be extended backwards to any past action or thought, “so far reaches the identity of that person” Bhabha,
2004:69. The replacement of such depth with the strategy of doubling has grown from Bhabha’s understanding of identification:
Each time the encounter with identity occurs at the point at which something exceeds the frame of the image, it eludes the eye, evacuates
the self as site of identity and autonomy and… leaves a resistant trace, a stain of the subject. We are [confronted] with the discursive strategy
of the moment of interrogation, a moment in which the demand for identification becomes, primarily, a response to other questions of
signification and desire, culture and politics Bhabha, 2004:70-71.
As a response to the Other the image’s representation is always spatially split – “it makes present something that is absent – and [it] temporally deferred”
Bhabha, 2004:73. From this point, Bhabha reassures that identity is never an affirmation of a pre-given identity, but rather a product of on-going process of
negotiation and articulation of cultural hybridity.
b. Hybridity
Hybridity is the basic concept in Bhabha’s discourse of postcolonial identity. Yet, discussing this terms will be incomplete without an
acknowledgement of his utilizing of the concept of the ‘beyond’. Following philosopher Heidegger, going ‘beyond’ considers the boundary, of time or
space, as not at which something stops, but it is when “something begins its
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presencing” Heidegger, 1971:152. The ‘beyond’ here is marked by the
liminal, that which in the border or threshold of culture or identity. It is in this liminal space, the beyond, of settled identity or culture where interaction
happens. The liminal is, thus, central of creation in new identity meaning, or as Bhabha suggests, the space becomes the sites of collaboration and
contestation in redefining postcolonial identity. Nevertheless, though the ‘beyond’ signifies spatial distance and opens up collaborative process, our
project to ‘exceed the barrier of boundary’ is unknowable without “a return to the ‘present’ which, in the process of repetition, becomes disjunct and
displaced” Bhabha, 2004:6. However displeasing this displacement might become, Walter Benjamin describes this disjunct moment as the establishment
of the conceptual ‘present’ as the “time of the now” quoted in Bhabha, 2004:6. To dwell in the ‘beyond’, then, is to
inhabit an intervening space, ... to be part of a revisionary time, a return to the present to redescribe our cultural contemporaneity; to
reinscribe our human, historic commonality; to touch the future on its hither side
Bhabha, 2004:10. Bhabha goes back to Fanon to suggest the importance of hybridity in
colonial condition. It is Fanon’s narrative of colonial condition which illuminates the phenomenon of ‘psychic trauma’: a psychic damage when the
colonial subject realizes that he cannot attain the whiteness he was taught to desire, or to shed the blackness he had learnt to devalue. Henceforward,
Bhabha states that the reality of colonial sphere is, however, a split presence: It is not the Colonialist Self or the Colonised Other, but the disturbing
distance in between that constitutes the figure of colonial otherness— the White man’s artifice inscribed on the Black man’s body. It is in
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relation to this impossible object that emerges the liminal problem of colonial identity and its vicissitudes Bhabha, 2004:117.
This colonial otherness not just evokes the ambivalence of colonial subject, but, as Bhabha suggests, is the effect of the colonial authority in circulating
the stereotype of inequalities between the Colonized and the Colonizer. However, Bhabha thinks that colonial authority undermines itself by being
unable to communicate its authenticity. In his essay, “Signs Taken for Wonders” 1985, Bhabha concludes that colonial authority is always
ambivalent: “[it] split[s] between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and difference” Bhabha, 1985:150.
Unavoidably, colonial authority has established a gap in its discourse, and it is in this gap that Bhabha puts his strategy of colonial resistance.
Engaging psychoanalytic language of subject formation has made Bhabha’s hybridity generalizing specific problem of identity. Loomba states
“We cannot appreciate the specific nature of diverse hybridities if we do not attend to the nuances of each of the cultures that come together or clash during
the colonial encounter” Loomba, 2005:150-151. To resolve the complexity of hybrid presence, Stuart Hall states that we should see the process of
identification as a “matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” as quoted by Loomba, 2005:152. Thus the colonised cannot simply turn back to find pre-
colonial collective identity, and to the past where something is waiting to be found to strengthen the sense of nativism. Since our history has been ruptured
by colonialism, we should decouple it from its colonial deployment and to appropriate it to designate identity as constructed process.
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Recent studies and theories on postcoloniality has developed attitude in comparing hybridity with rootedness or nation. Kortenaar has reminded that
neither authenticity nor creolization is an inherently progressive or regressive position Kortenaar, 1995:40-41. Authenticity can be both enabling or
destroying, as it is evident in some characters in postcolonial fictions. The task in scrutinizing postcolonial mixed identity, Loomba says, is then “to locate
and evaluate their ideological, political and emotional valencies, as well as their intersections in the multiple histories of colonialism and postcoloniality”
Loomba, 2005:153.
c. Mimicry
