2022 IB Diploma Extended Essays

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deeper self-struggle and incongruity between his desired identity and his reality. As a whole, the narrative style and blur between memory and imagination allows Adiga to fully expose readers to Danny’s thoughts and perceptions. Moreover, Adiga constructs the anxious, layered text to mirror Danny’s internal conflict, employing careening phone calls and identity uncertainty to emphasise his lack of sense of self. The irregular and intentionally uncomfortable narrative structure of Adiga’s Amnesty indicates Danny’s uncertainty regarding his character and memories, pointing to the consequences of his hybrid cultural identity. Ultimately, Adiga emphasises the anxiety and paranoia which results from immigration and perception of oneself as ‘other’. Throughout Caswell’s text, the blend of memory and reality blurs the line between truth and fiction, emphasising the impact of immigrational trauma on young characters. Caswell repeatedly references time and trauma’s impact on memory; he “mixes-up memories with poetry and action”, and Linh recalls that this blend can lead to stories becoming “part of your memory, almost as real as your own recollections” (20) (Cole, 2007). Due to the interview style of the novel, direct addresses such as Linh’s use of “your” in this statement are frequent, personalising the Vo family’s experience; moreover, the collective language emphasises their belief that the journey was normal. Despite these realizations, she and Toan continue to recount their journey using collective and casual language, implying their continued perception that their journey is ordinary. Thus, Caswell highlights the immigration’s impact on their view of reality and truth; while recognizing that their memories are likely influenced by stories, both Linh and Toan continue to believe those recollections. Caswell employs this explicit narratorial unreliability in which his characters overtly state the biases present within their own tales to emphasise the youth of Linh and Toan and their loss of innocence through the immigration. Caswell suggests that his characters’ immigration has led their inability to form reliable memories, as they have been forced to developmentally jump from being children to facing