Identity at Extremes: The Many Faces of Jesus’ Son Sita L Hill 12th Grade

Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Identity and Intercultural Communication by Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama are both concerned with identity and the effect it can have on the way someone’s life turns out. While Jesus’ Son is a book of short stories about a character, Identity and Intercultural Communication is an essay about how identity is created and how it defines us. Using these texts together reveals a deeper meaning in Jesus’ Son and shows how either being accepted by society or thrown to the curb can have a large impact on how we identify and how others identify us.

Both authors of Jesus’ Son and Identity and Intercultural Communication would agree that identity can cause people to slip through the cracks. The narrator of Jesus’ Son is an outlaw. He commits crimes, doesn’t have much of a moral ground, and uses a lot of drugs. One reason for this is his feeling of not belonging anywhere within``` society. Near the end of the novel he is working in a care center for disabled people and he reflects that he “had never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us” (Johnson 133). Since this comes at the end of the book it shows that the rest of the novel he hadn’t felt like he had a “place”...