Notes of a Native Son

“A Question of Identity” was originally published in Partisan Review in July/August 1954. Baldwin discusses the American student colony in Paris as a social phenomenon. He notes at the outset of the essay that it defies general description, but he proceeds to identify and describe different categories of American students in Paris. Writing as he was in the post-war years of the late 1940s and early 1950s, Baldwin notes that the expectation that American students in Paris were mostly ex-GIs is inaccurate. For Baldwin, the two main categories of American students in Paris are those who embrace home and those who embrace the continent. The former end up disillusioned with Paris, missing the familiarity of America, and pack their bags to go home. The latter adapt themselves to Parisian life so thoroughly that they have no desire to speak English let alone return to America.

Baldwin acknowledges that these two types represent two extremes, with far more gradations in between. Nonetheless, he writes, every American in Europe is everywhere confronted with the question of identity. For Baldwin, many of these Americans abroad are bewildered by this question and the tensions therein. The reason for this confusion, he avers, is that they are quintessentially American: they have a flimsy sense of time, a sentimental understanding of society’s limitations, and a distorted notion that their shapelessness is actually freedom.