“Who Am I”

“Who Am I?” is a recurring question that links Will Radley’s disorientation to the return of a past he cannot easily face. First spoken during a frightened exchange with Helen Radley, it resurfaces in a pub conversation and becomes the hinge between Will’s present encounter and his memory of Tess Copeland.

First occurrence

Will asks the question while interrupting Helen’s lullaby. The preceding moment finds him in a state of panic, checking that his neck is intact; Helen answers his question about who he is by reassuring him that he is a good and kind man. His brief insistence, “But who?”, shows that her affectionate description does not resolve the uncertainty he is expressing. The question is less a request for a character assessment than an unresolved challenge to the self Helen believes she recognizes.

The question returns

Later, in a pub, Will approaches a man sitting alone with a whisky. Will speaks about the loss of community and the possibility that two strangers can still talk, then remarks that they are not strangers. The man asks, “Who am I?”—the same question Will had asked in his dream. Will recognizes the echo and answers indirectly, suggesting that people are those who cannot let go. The exchange gives the phrase a changed direction: what began as Will’s inward question is now spoken by someone whose connection to him is about to become clear.

Tess and the buried past

When the man names his wife as Tess Copeland and says she was the mother of his child, Will is thrown off balance. The name takes him back to a rowboat and to a night when he drank with Tess in the university union bar. He remembers their playful discussion of the philosopher Michel Foucault and Tess’s uncertainty about being out late with her tutor when she wanted to return to her husband. The conversation in the pub therefore makes the repeated question more than a verbal motif: it precedes the disclosure that brings Will face to face with a consequential part of his past, and his struggle to answer marks the limit of his composure.