Identity and its physicality in V.S.

Naipaul’s ‘One Out of

Many’ and Catherine Lacey’s Pew

Name: Snauwaert Andrès

Date: 2 June 2022
Assignment: Comparative
Paper
Word count: 2131
 Abstract

Literature often tackles questions about identity and its intricacy; for instance, a
sense of identity can be influenced by physicality. ‘One Out of Many’ by V.S. Naipaul, the
story of a man’s discovery of himself and its consequences, and Pew by Catherine Lacey,
on how the body can be experienced as limiting the unfolding of identity, display the
psyche-centred nature of literature. The stories are compared through analysis and
research by Morgan and Humann, in light of the protagonists ponderings about how
they feel about themselves. Santosh in ‘One Out of Many’ on the one hand becomes
aware of his individuality and identity by gaining his freedom; contrary to what would
be expected his mental and physical health deteriorate. In the end he acquiesces in his
faith. Pew on the other hand fights against being subjected to a rigid, unambiguous
reading of themself and sees themself as separate from their body. Ultimately, they cross
the border into the transcendental, becoming a disembodied soul. Both tales offer an
insight into involuntarily being confronted with being a person of your own and being
seen as one, though neither present a feasible way out.

Keywords: Identity; Freedom; Physicality; One Out of Many; Pew; Catherine Lacey; V.S.
Naipaul; Comparative Paper

Word count: 191

The possession of a body is intricately linked to one’s identity, though both Pew and
Santosh, the protagonists of Pew by Catherine Lacey and ‘One Out of Many’ by V.S.
Naipaul respectively, would argue that physicality ultimately ends up being a burden
and can be experienced as limiting one’s sense of identity. Bennett and Royle claim that
in literature “questions about the nature of personal identity are most provocatively
articulated” (151), and indeed, both stories encourage the reader to think about how a
sense of identity is connected to taking up space on Earth. While Santosh embarks on a
journey to discover himself as an individual, Pew seems an almost flat character,
continuously vague, who to the reader always remains a stranger. Either finally reaches
the same conclusion, though neither have the same the reaction.
‘One out of Many’ starts
with Santosh stating that he is an
American citizen living in the
capital of the world (Washington
D.C.) and that “many people […]
will feel that [he] has done well.
But” (Naipaul 999). That ‘but’
undermines the entire opening
statement: while other people
may feel Santosh has done well,
he does not believe so himself.
The subsequent retrospective
story, acting as an explanation, is
“an act of memory, which
reconstructs the process of
(un)becoming” (Morgan 2). The
man at the beginning differs
strongly from the one telling the

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tale, in having gained a sense of
his identity, yet this also entails a
loss. At the same time the
protagonist becomes an
individual and unbecomes who he
used to be.
For the first part of the
story, Santosh’s sense of himself
relies heavily on his employer,
hence he wanted to follow him
from Bombay to the United States;
stated as a fact, he tells how “the
respect and security [he] enjoyed
were due to the importance of
[his] employer” (Naipaul 999).
The social stratification in 1960s
India has a deep influence on how
the protagonist sees himself, his
identity was “shored up on every
hand by caste certainties”
(Morgan 2). He does not
experience a lower ranking in the
hierarchy as inequality, the caste
system was a convention to him
and he was merely “part of the
flow” (Naipaul 1020). Upon
arriving in America, however, that
almost shifts immediately.
Unconsciously, the Western air
moves him to “[feel] like a
prisoner” (Naipaul 1002) after not
even a day has passed. Although
the geographical change
symbolises the transition from an
Indian perspective on castes to a
Western point of view, Santosh

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remains seeing himself in the
shadow of his employer
When he sees his
employer “falsely representing,
even prostituting the spirituality
of his people and culture”
(Morgan 4) to conform to the
Westerner’s idea of Indian
culture, Santosh feels it “had
[never] anything to do with [him]”
(Naipaul 1004). The first cracks in
his belief in a complete dichotomy
between Indianism and
Westernism begin to show.
Santosh is deeply disturbed by the
thought of a combination of any
cultures, illustrated by the
discomfort he feels upon the
realisation of the mixed birth of
the dancers at the roundabout. He
suddenly sees them as “strangers,
but that perhaps once upon a time
they had been like me” (Naipaul
1004) and rejects the kinship they
might have offered him out of
“fear of contamination […]”; to
him, “syncretism and hybridity
bring risk, not enrichment”
(Morgan 6). It could be argued
however that at this point, the
‘uncontaminated’ Indian Santosh
is already doomed.
The same idea of the
hybrid is present in Pew, where
the titular character’s ambiguous
appearance cannot be accepted by

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the community in which they find
themselves, which demands them
to disclose their gender and race.
Santosh struggles with his hybrid
identity as much as the
community struggles with Pew’s.
It seems as though they cannot be
identified without their body
being known. Here identity can be
linked with physicality: Pew sees
themselves more like an entity,
with the physical form keeping
them grounded, an idea present
from the very beginning of the
novel, when they announce that
“[their] body hangs beneath
[them], carries [them] around, but
it does not seem to belong to
them” (Lacey 5). Indeed, it rather
belongs to the community, which
gets to subject Pew: after all, as
humans “we are subjects in the
sense of being ‘subject to’ others
‘by control or dependence’”
(Bennett & Royle 151).
Deep in thought, Pew
loses themself in the idea of an
disembodied world, a world
where “our bodies wouldn’t
determine our lives, the lives of
others” (Lacey 71). Here it
becomes clear that the
protagonist does not only feel
disconnected from their body but
also deems it a burden, it is a
place where the soul goes to die:

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 “the body is your tomb” (Lacey
74). The previous statement
further corroborates the
hypothesis of Pew not thinking of
their flesh as their own,
illustrating their belief that the
body is inadequate to portray
who humans are, a limiting
vehicle for the soul. Even more so,
they might see it as the culprit of
all suffering:

The question arose then—did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these
failing things […]? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything? Why
did we draw conclusions with our bodies when the body is so inconclusive, so
mercurial? (Lacey 91-92)

On that basis they firmly renounce any link to their flesh, which is only there for others
to base their prejudices and stereotypes on, which is only there to be subject to external
forces outside their control. They do not think “all this skin, all this weight” a valid
foundation for an entire human life, when “only our thoughts and intentions” matter
(Lacey 71).
Human beings can
sometimes act in a way which is
out of character, surprising even
themselves, and everyone
changes throughout their life,
though at their core they are still
themselves. At a certain point, a
teenager called Annie entrusts
Pew with a belief which supports
the theory of an ambiguous
identity:

Nobody is just one person, […] actually we’re a bunch of different people and we
have to figure out how to cooperate and fool everyone else into thinking that
we’re just one person. (Lacey 147)

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This notion is mirrored in Santosh admitting “it [was] as though [he] has had several
lives” (Naipaul 1020). Thus both texts raise the topic of multiple, seemingly
disconnected, people inhabiting the same. Still this amalgamation of personalities is the
precedent of one soul. Annie’s words capture the complexity of the soul, the rejection of
being cast into a single role: anthropologist Aisha Khan believes that outwardly
incompatible ideas, dreams, quirks, qualities et cetera “are not self-contained or
mutually exclusive”; indeed, identity entails a certain fluidity (Khan qtd. in Morgan 6).
The whole is greater than the sum of its divergent parts.
The fluidity of identity is symbolised through Pew’s equivocal appearance, no
one can say with certainty what they look like. At first glance one might see a black girl,
only to later call it into question: suddenly, their skin colour is lighter and they look
more masculine. The one thing the community can agree on is that they “have some real
disagreements about what … Pew looks like” (Lacey 142).
The second part of
Naipaul’s story introduces an
element which in time will make
Santosh realise what Pew has
known all along: the encumbrance
of humanity’s physicality. For the
first half of his life he had thought
of himself as “unnoticeable”, but
after having been subjected to the
advances of a hubshi1 woman he
“made a discovery [: his] face was
handsome” (Naipaul 1007).
Another man might have taken
this handsomeness as gift, this
one in particular did not; on the
contrary, he felt it brought “its
strains” (Naipaul 1007). Now
Santosh was aware of his looks, he
became obsessed with how was
perceived by others and
ultimately his awareness causes a
sense of identity to surface. A total

1
Derogatory Indian term for African blacks.

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 realisation of himself as an
“individual with an identity”
(Humann 80) comes into fruition
when the hubshi start burning
Washington in the wake of Martin
Luther King’s assassination.
The agency of the African
Americans2 to rebel against
structural racism revealed to
Santosh his own agency and its
consequences and in a moment of
despair he longs for the flames to
take him, as “an engulfment that
ends individual choice and moral
responsibility” (Morgan 9). A few
days later the fires have
disappeared, though their impact
remains on the protagonist’s
mind, the knowledge of his agency
brings the possibility of escape. It
was a simple enough idea, yet “it
hadn’t occurred to him before”
(Naipaul 1010). The escape could
take him back to Bombay, but he
couldn’t never return to that place
and lead the same kind of life he
had before: his sense of self
prevents him from “easily
[becoming] part of someone else’s
presence again” (Naipaul 1010),
since “Once the self is discovered
it can never be surrendered
again” (Kumar qtd. in Humann
80). One day, by pure chance, he

2
After some research I decided to use ‘African American’ as a historical term, I hope this term is
politically correct as I do not wish to cause anyone any offence.

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stumbles into Priya and leaves his
old employer to cook for this man
in his restaurant. At first he seems
quite happy, but it does not take
long for things to deteriorate.
The third phase in
Santosh’s evolution involves a
certain anxiety reminiscent of
how he felt when first coming to
America. The knowledge that he
can act for himself proves to much
for, quite like the weight from the
actions’ consequences: he now
requires a green card, has secrets
to keep out of shame, has
dishonoured himself by sleeping
with a hubshi woman… No longer
a part of his employer he was free,
yet he had not anticipated to
suffer “the slings and arrows of
outrageous fortune” (Shakespeare
3.1.60). This is not only a mental
suffering but also a physical one,
sometimes when he awakened
“[his] body would burn” (Naipaul
1014), displaying the
interwovenness of individuality
with the body. The problem of the
green card is resolved by
marrying, making him a truly free
man, much to the delight of Priya
(it was his idea), who does not
understand the exact nature of his
cook’s anxiety. “I [Santosh] was
pleased that he was pleased”
signifies that true freedom does

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not mean anything to him, but in
sharing his boss’ happiness he
relapses into a form of his former
servility. Santosh has rejected “his
emerging individuality” (Morgan
7) but the damage has been done:
he “had made [himself] nothing”
(Naipaul 1018).

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 The end of Santosh’s tale
allows for some similarities with
Pew. Having closed “[his] mind
and heart to the English language”
(Naipaul 1020), his rejection of
communication with Westerners
reminds of Pew’s own selective
mutism and both can be read as a
rebellion against the forced
determined individuality. Pew
takes this a degree further and
lets themself get carried away by
the simultaneously certain and
uncertain wind and sky in what
can interpreted as a
transcendental regeneration into
a form without physicality. Rid of
their physicality, though not
entirely aware of it they admit “no
one knows where I went, and I
don’t know where I went”. What
they did know was that they
“[were] gone and [were]
completely gone” (Lacey 206),
thus accomplishing what they had
been longing for all along. Santosh
on the other hand has decided to
live in quiet acceptance, not
wishing to act any longer and
rather letting himself get carried
by life like a leaf by the wind; the
knowledge of his identity and
individuality had proven too
much, now he does not want “to
understand or learn anymore”
(Nailpaul 1020).

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 So when both stories are
at an end, Pew and Santosh are
not so different from one another.
Both experience their flesh as
something to be maintained, a
connection to the physical world
as limitation of one’s soul. The
closing statement of ‘One Out of
Many’ neatly summarises the
evolution its main character has
lived through:

I was once part of the flow, never thinking of myself as a presence. Then I looked
in the mirror and decided to be free. All that freedom has brought me is the
knowledge that I have a face and have a body, that I must feed this body and
clothe this body for a certain number of years. Then it will be over. (Naipaul
1020)

The lines highlight the difference with the ending to Pew: they were never part of a flow,
always more than an individual. Ultimately Pew could rise above their body, while
Santosh remains painfully grounded.

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 Works Cited
Bennett, Andrew, and Nicholas Royle. “Me.” An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and
Theory. 5th ed., Routledge, 2016, pp. 150-158.
Humann, Heather Duerre. “The Meaning of Freedom: Human Rights in V. S. Naipaul’s
‘One Out of Many’”. South Atlantic Review, vol. 75, no. 2, 2010, pp. 77–83.
Lacey, Catherine. Pew. Granta Books, 2021.
Morgan, Paula. “Consorting with Kali: Migration and Identity in Naipaul’s ‘One Out of
Many’”. Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal, vol. 5, no. 2, Fall 2007, article 8.
Naipaul, V.S. “One Out of Many.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature, edited by
Jahan Ramazani and Stephen Greenblatt, 10th ed., Volume F, W.W. Norton &
Company, 2019, p. 999-1020.
Shakespeare, William. Hamlet (Wordsworth Classics). Annotated, Wordsworth Editions
Ltd, 1997.

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