Thirst for Identity in James Welch’s Winter in the Blood: A Study of Rejection, Isolation and Segregation

Abstract

Society gifts a person with myriad of identities, in different places a person has to put up different attire. He has to juggle with the multiplicity of pretentiousness where he loses his uniqueness. Everything changes when the attire is ripped, damaged, torn, ragged and finally converted to rugs. A man then starts feeling miserable to see the original him. At certain spaces he feels rejected and tries to get alienated, which results in his isolation that makes him believe that he is standing without identity. In the novel, Winter in the Blood, we meet a thirty- two year old narrator who is nameless and is disheartened facing the societal challenges, who is rejected, isolated and segregated and has no corner to breathe a colorful life with shimmering sound. He thus, chooses a deep dark nook to breathe Nihilism. The narrator is so much normal to the entire non normal situations that now he feels nothing for any situation or person. We can see his losses, his pain, and his struggle for survival when we catch all twenty-two situations where he can adjure neither his love nor his fear. A sense of helplessness and the fear of being stalked by the shadow of white-men traumatize him and drag him towards alienation and isolation. The present paper aims at analyzing the crisis of self identity in the novel, Winter in the Blood.