When the Mask Changes the Self: Identity and Impersonation in Fiction
Impersonation stories usually begin with a practical problem. A king is missing, a fortune is inaccessible or a plan requires someone to occupy another person’s place long enough for the machinery around that identity to keep working. The initial task seems technical: reproduce the face, learn the history, wear the correct clothes and survive the scrutiny of people who believe they know the original. The deeper problem appears after the performance succeeds. Identity may mean a legal name, an office, a body, a remembered past, a set of loyalties or the person other people have learned to recognise, and those elements do not always move together. A role can become socially real before it feels psychologically true. Recognition grants access and authority; repetition builds habits; relationships generate obligations. The person beneath the disguise does not vanish, but neither can that person return untouched after living through consequences created by the borrowed identity. The m...