Victor's Last Wishes Short Story

The purpose of this paper is to discuss two characters in the midst of an identity crisis. The characters to be discussed in this paper are Vickramadas from Kris Jitab’s ‘Victor’s Last Wish’ and Muthu from K. S. Maniam’s ‘Haunting the Tiger’.

According to the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, an identity crisis is defined as a personal psychosocial conflict about one’s social positioning and a sense of confusion in one’s personality. An identity crisis also means a feeling of unhappiness and confusion caused by not being sure about what type of person you really are or what the true purpose of your life is.

‘Victor’s Last Wish’ by Kris Jitab, was published in 2004. The short story is in pre-independence Malaya. The main theme of the short story is the search for identity which leads to the main character’s eventual downfall. In the short story, Vickramadas goes through a racial identity crisis. It begins with Vickramadas, an ambitious man from India migrating to Malaya in search of work. He climbs the career ladder at a British owned rubber estate starting as an accounts clerk. Vickramadas then attempts to

In his attempts to be a white man, Vickramadas in unable to understand the double standard surrounding him due to the colour of his skin. He truly believes that if he changes himself enough, he is able to acclimate himself fully with the British. After converting to Christianity and changing his name to Victor Gorphal, he does not understand how an acquaintance was able to guess his country of origin. ‘How did the sod guess?’ he wondered in page 82. Vickramadas is truly confident that he could successfully court and marry Miss Cunningham, a white woman. Not even contemplating that their racial differences may hinder his advances or her acceptance of him. This self-deception trait of his feeds into his delusion that he can change his racial identity. ‘The sky’s the limit, Vic’ he said to himself on page