Self and Subjectivity

In Turtles All the Way Down, selfhood and subjectivity are not abstract philosophical topics set apart from daily life: for Aza Holmes, they become a question of whether she exists as a person distinct from thoughts and conditions she cannot choose. The novel traces that question from an embarrassed confession, through an episode of acute distress in which even the words for self and threat come apart, to a brief but consequential experience of being both a story and its teller. It does not settle the matter by discovering an untouched inner essence. Instead, it tests how a sense of self might persist amid involuntary thought, bodily vulnerability, and changing circumstances.

The self as circumstance

In a conversation with Daisy Ramirez, Aza admits that she fears she might be fictional. The fear grows from a question about whether a person remains the same across changes in money, romantic relationships, and school. Aza cannot locate a deep-down person who stands apart from those circumstances, and she interprets that absence as evidence that she may be no more than the conditions shaping her. The confession is difficult to make: she feels embarrassed and even fears that naming the thought could make it dangerous. Her uncertainty is therefore both conceptual and intimate, a doubt about existence that she struggles to voice to a friend.

Aza’s reasoning begins from the limits of control. She does not choose what she thinks, whether she sweats, or whether she develops an illness; outside forces seem to govern both mind and body. If thoughts do not feel authored by her and the body does not behave according to her will, she wonders what remains that can properly be called hers. She clarifies that she is not hallucinating. The fear is more fundamental: she is unsure whether she is, strictly speaking, real. By linking mental experience, bodily processes, and changing social conditions, the novel makes the question of selfhood inseparable from the experience of living in a body and a life that cannot be fully directed.

The reply she receives challenges the inference without pretending that the involuntary thoughts are easy to bear. The other speaker compares Aza’s feeling of imprisonment within a self that does not seem wholly hers to Molly Bloom’s plea near the end of Ulysses. She then distinguishes Aza from her thoughts: thoughts are thoughts, not the whole person, and their alien quality does not mean that Aza does not belong to herself. The discussion turns to Descartes. Doubt, in the fuller formulation recalled in the conversation, establishes the doubter’s existence even when the reality of everything else remains uncertain. The answer reframes Aza’s doubt as evidence of a person experiencing it, rather than proof of her nonexistence. It offers a way to understand her as real without requiring her to identify herself with every thought.

When the question becomes a crisis

The distinction between a person and her thoughts does not simply end the struggle. In a later episode, Aza is physically unwell in bed and rebukes herself over drinking hand sanitizer, while fearing that unseen forces can direct what her brain thinks. Even yielding to the intrusive thought brings only a moment of relief. The scene shows why a philosophical reassurance cannot function as an easy cure: the thought returns with a bodily force that Aza experiences as difficult to resist, and her attention is pulled back toward the question of who is in control.

A question Dr. Karen Singh asked years earlier resurfaces: whether Aza feels like a threat to herself. Aza cannot determine which part of the sentence is the threat and which is the self. As the distinction blurs, the pronouns shift among “we,” “you,” “she,” “it,” and “they”; her cry for an “I” gives grammatical form to the struggle to claim a coherent subject position. She tries to describe herself as slipping or descending, then recognizes that these are only metaphors and cannot convey the feeling itself. The experience is instead one of not being herself, as though someone else had forged her. The wish to be released from whoever is authoring her ends in the blunt fact that she cannot get out. Here, the novel makes the problem of agency a crisis in language as well as in thought: the first-person self she needs to name becomes hardest to hold precisely when she feels most governed by forces outside her will.

Hollow dolls and the search for an inner core

Later, when Daisy asks whether Aza hates herself, Aza rejects self-hatred as an adequate description. The problem, as she explains it, is that looking inward produces no discoverable, solid person: only thoughts, behaviors, and circumstances, many of which do not feel like her own or reflect what she wants to think and do. She compares the search to opening a succession of nesting dolls. Each contains another, smaller hollow doll; unlike the imagined final doll, which would be solid all the way through, Aza’s sequence never reaches a substantial core. The image gives physical shape to the earlier fear that a person might be no more than circumstances, while also sharpening its emotional cost: introspection does not reveal a hidden self that can settle the doubt.

The novel lets that image remain difficult rather than resolving it with a declaration that Aza has found her authentic center. Her account presents a real problem in how she experiences herself; it does not establish that no self exists. The answer offered in the earlier conversation remains relevant here: the fact that thoughts are not wholly chosen need not make them the whole person. Yet the repeated return of the question shows the limits of reassurance. Selfhood is not secured once and for all by a logical argument, especially when bodily distress and compulsive thought repeatedly make the distinction between self and thought feel unstable.

Relation, story, and a provisional self

On the drive with Daisy and Mychal Turner toward the art sewer, singing with Daisy to one of their favorite songs gives Aza a different way to apprehend herself. She describes the moment through paired roles and apparent opposites: a person can be fire and the water that extinguishes it, narrator and protagonist, sidekick and storyteller, the one who tells a story and the one it tells. The sequence does not present agency as total command over the mind. Instead, it imagines a self that can occupy several positions at once and can belong to a relation without being reduced to it. For a moment, Aza feels that she is somebody’s something and also her own self.

Thinking about the title image of turtles all the way down, Aza considers how two accounts can coexist: the world can be ancient and life shaped by nucleotide mutation, while the world is also made meaningful through the stories people tell about it. That thought does not discard material reality in favor of narrative. It makes room for both: processes that no individual chooses and the accounts through which a life becomes intelligible. The movement from the hollow dolls to the storyteller is not proof that Aza has located an unchanging inner core. It is a shift in emphasis, from searching for a self untouched by circumstance to recognizing that a person may participate in telling and inhabiting a story even when she cannot control all its contents.

The book’s closing glimpse of an imagined future extends that possibility without turning it into certainty. Aza pictures a life that continues through college, work, changes of home, and a friendship with Daisy that grows more loyal as their lives diverge. The narration calls the singular proper noun I something that would go on, if always in a conditional tense. That qualification matters: continuity is envisioned, not guaranteed by access to a permanent essence. In the interview material, the book’s author likewise describes Aza’s problem as an inability to define her will and as a survival-level need to imagine herself as a coherent, integrated self despite thoughts that feel foreign. Together, the novel’s images and that explanation frame subjectivity as an ongoing, vulnerable effort to inhabit a life—not the certainty of controlling every thought, but the possibility of continuing as a person amid change.