We Read To Find Out Who We Are

My 10th grade English teacher told my class that we read to discover who we are and when I found out that he would be my AP English teacher this year I was curious to see who we would become as a class. Instead, I'm finding out that it's not just my class that is being labeled by each stereotype presented in the class, but society as a whole. Our summer reading consisted of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and The Kite Runner, two novels that appear to have nothing in common at all and yet each of us could connect with a character.

In Cuckoo's Nest it's the character of Chief that we become, the person allowing the government and our peers to walk all over us for "the good of the people". It's better if they keep all the free-thinkers locked in cells, stifling their creativity and punishing them for their art. Lobotomy corrects this imbalance, they say. However, if I were to turn it around to someone else, would they believe that I could cure their insomnia or their near-sightedness by chopping up their brain? I doubt it. So why does it make it okay for them to take us, the naive artists and thinkers that we are, and rid us of what makes us different? Is it because we scare them? Or is it because they're jealous? We are Chief, we are the man who shows that nothing is really impossible if you want it enough but we're also the same person who pretends to be deaf and dumb because it's less painful that way.

 In Kite Runner it's not as hard to identify with the main character Amir. He's jealous, greedy, insecure, weak and he makes really bad literary jokes that the reader secretly found humorous. His best friend is his slave, and secretly his half-brother and he hates him. He hates that he's so perfect, that's he's the personification of a Christian angel in a Muslim world. In their home in Afganistan, Amir does everything in his power to hurt Hassan, his brother. He hits him, he frames him for the robbery of birthday presents, and finally his father releases Hassan. Amir's father cries at the parting, Amir doesn't say a word but just watches him leave.

Neither Amir nor Chief are someone that I'm proud to say that I am but in our next book in class, I wasn't happy to say that I was Homer's Achilles in The Illiad. A childish man who sits and broods for nine books because he can't have more women to pair with the bloodshed falling at his hands. A man whose only weakness is a tendon in his ankle, the first Western hero and yet, I don't want to be him either. I don't want to pout and be stubborn, waiting for people to do things my way. Why not just take matters into your own hands? Achilles is a hero, the son of a goddess, and he has to pout about not having enough slave girls to pleasure him? It's stupid.

If we read to find out who we are, why do we always find that it's the characters that we're supposed to be that we hate the most?