Thomas Kings Truth and Bright Water Essay

In the Thomas King’s novel “Truth & Bright Water” the author makes use of various characters in book so as to deliver numerous themes that are relevant from his book. One of the significant theme in his work is self –identity whereby a number of characters fight and struggle to realize their own self-identity. Therefore, this piece of work is going to explore the theme of self-identity in Thomas King’s novel Truth & Bright Water. (King p. 78) In this novel, the aboriginal characters seem to not be satisfied with their own identity and thus most of them suffer psychologically as they try to define who they are in their own ways. Following the death of Lum after committing suicide his father realized his mistakes for he ended up losing his entire family due to his arrogance and toughness while trying to console himself of his mistakes.

Therefore, Franklin also found himself struggling to realize his self-identity because he had lost his family members through death. Franklin thus makes an attempt to be regain his normal life but that couldn’t happen because he had already made a mistake by mistreating his only son to an extend that he ended up committing suicide. Having caused the death of his son his self-identity became misplaced for he found it hard to interact with his sisters for he had done a mistake in the past that seemed to be haunting him in life. This is a clear illustration that past events or history can impact an individual’s personality negatively. No matter how hard she tried to forget her daughter, her mistake wouldn’t allow her to do so.

Occasionally found herself struggling with finding her own identity now that she had failed to be responsible. Helen also found herself struggling with identity with her family because of the problems that her family was going through. For Hellen, she played the role of hiding and fixing all the difficulties that lied in her own family. By the fact that she was sister to Cassie who had difficulties and also being married to a man who was unstable and damaged by the name Elvin, She thus had a duty of of reuniting her family pieces by trying her efforts to hold them back. Lucy finally, disowns her dark hair and appearance and rather wants to have fake hair which is blonde and also wants her skin to be pale in color which is what she perceives to be beauty.