Throughout the novel, we learn more about Tyler’s internal struggle to define who and what he is. He says that he is\u00a0\u201cnot a man and not ever able to be a woman, suspended nameless in the limbo state between existence and non-existence\u201d (77). Rather than just existing as he is, he feels that he needs to label his identity. When Tyler first meets Mala Ramchandin, he is immediately drawn to her, and sympathizes with her. In one of their first encounters, Tyler says\u00a0\u201cI brought my face inches away from hers and whispered, ‘If I were strapped like that, I would hate it, too.’ And then I felt foolish, for what was the point of empathizing without taking more positive action?” Though he is not talking about Mala being trapped in her identity like he is, I think it is an excellent physical representation of how Tyler feels. Mala physically cannot move because she is tightly strapped to her bed, while Tyler is trapped in his “in-between-ness” of identity. He says he “would” hate being strapped down like Mala, which he is, in a different way.\u00a0Perhaps Tyler realizes this after, as he asks\u00a0what was the point of “empathizing”, rather than just sympathizing. This shows that he knows how she feels in his own way.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Throughout the novel, we learn more about Tyler’s internal struggle to define who and what he is. He says that he is\u00a0\u201cnot a man and not ever able to be a woman, suspended nameless in the limbo state between existence and non-existence\u201d (77). Rather than just existing as he is, he feels that he needs … Continue reading Tyler’s Identity<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2970,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[123782],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2016-blog-post"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2970"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1101"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1101\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/everythinginbetween\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}