After reading Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luiselli, I learned that identity is not something fixed, but something constantly shaped by memory, imagination, and the stories we tell ourselves. The author shows how the boundaries between past and present or reality and fiction can be confusing to people so easily they can overlap. The narrator shifting her life in New York and her later life as a mother highlights how memory is fragmented and unreliable, but still influential. What really stood out to me the most was the idea of “ghosts”, as these are not literal spirits but representations of thoughts and past memories that are always on people’s minds. The book shows how deeply we can as individuals lose ourselves in these imagination and past memory, as the narrator’s connection to Gilberto Owen suggests that identity can dissolve when we immerse ourselves too much into someone else’s story. Moreover, I also learned that writing itself is not always complete, as the authors style of writing which is sort of fragmented forces us to piece together meaning like how we try to understand and make sense of the world or our lives. I also found that the story does not always have a clear narrator as the voice keeps changing which makes it hard to tell what is real or simply an imagination. I think this reflects how identity can feel confusing and never a sure fixed idea, as we are constantly influenced by our emotions and past experiences. Just like the narrator again shifting between perspectives, our sense of who we are individually can also change by the situations we put ourselves in which emphasizes that identity is something fluid rather than permanent. After watching the lecture video on this book, it explored the idea that time and space are not fixed, but constantly shifting. I really found it interesting how the lecture emphasizes movement between cities and identities as it shows that the narrator is always in “transit”, as this connects to the novel’s fragmented structure that the past and present blend together. In addition, it deepened my understanding of “haunting” as it is more about memories and experiences that “haunt” us everywhere we go, which I thought was a really good way to understand our past memories. Overall, this book made me reflect on identity and how we construct it through memory, which can both define and somehow confuse ourselves to who we really are, which I think is very relatable. My question is “do you think the narrator is losing her sense of who she is throughout the book, or is she discovering who her new version of herself is?”
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