‘So many disguises’: Questions of Identity in Robert Cormier’s After the First Death and Heroes

Questions of identity are important to Robert Cormier’s young adult protagonists as part of their engagement with the unstable and shifting postmodern world that they must negotiate. Cormier’s teenagers are emergent adults who share a quest, ultimately, to discover, as the doomed Ben Marchand in After the First Death (1979) expresses it, ‘Who I am’.1 It is the way in which identity emerges through crisis, however, that Cormier foregrounds. His teenage characters are not fixed: they are works in progress that shift with the uncertainties of the trials they encounter. Identity becomes more the focus of an ongoing inner dialogue than a defining character statement. Characters like Kate Forrester, the teenage bus-driver and heroine of After the First Death, challenge the notion of identity as something identifiable. Identity shifts. One never knows how one is going to be or act. She acknowledges that ‘there were other Kate Forresters, and she wondered about them sometimes’2 as if identity is more about multiple selves than about a defining personality that determines one’s fate. Kate’s own identity becomes of pivotal importance in the novel at the moment the hijackers enter the school bus and realise that the driver ‘turned out not to be a man’.3