Middlesex Identity Crisis Essay

One of the many themes found in the novel Middlesex is identity crisis. This is because the book is about a character named Cal or Calliope who goes through multiple changes as to who they are based on the way that both they and their environment believes that they should express themselves. These influences are clearly exspresed from the first time we meet Cal “ I was born twice: first, as a baby girl, on a remarkably smogless Detroit day in January of 1960; and then again, as a teenage boy, in an emergency room near Petoskey, Michigan, in August of 1974. … I’ve been ridiculed by classmates, guinea-pigged by doctors, palpated by specialists, and researched by the March of Dimes. A redheaded girl from Grosse Pointe fell in love with me, not

By expressing this information in the format that he does, and by including some personal experience it connects you to Cal. It draws you in making you want to understand what has lead to this point in his life where he feels like another birth is coming. When you lead a story with something so different as being born twice the author needs to go back and build a strong foundation for this to be an occurrence. It can be seen like reading the last chapter of the book first you know mostly how it ends but to learn the adventure you need to read the whole thing. Eugenides decided to lead with information that you normally would not learn until you were farther into the novel by enticing people with a struggle that most people feel at some point in their lives of trying to figure out who they are, just on a much bigger span of time because it is necessary for Cal to unwind his family's history to understand what is going on with him. I would not change the title of the book unless it were absolutely necessary because I have rarely seen a title so short but so