Mosquitoland

Mim’s search for identity drives much of the novel. As a self-described anomaly and outlier, she starts the novel without any friends. Without the influence of a peer group, she derives much of her identity from her mother. At times, it’s even difficult to know where she ends and her mother begins, as evidenced by the symbolic dream in which she and her mother morph into the same person while standing in front of the mirror: “I am not me, I said to the […] face in the mirror. And it was true. In the dream, the reflection staring back was not my own. It was my mother’s” (200).

Everything that her mother adores, she loves as well. This loyalty to her mom drives a wedge between her and her dad. When her dad put her on medication, her mom objected, and so did Mim. When her dad disapproved of Eve’s potentially inappropriate comments to Mim, she sided with her mom. When the divorce dissolves the family, Mim blames her dad and Kathy because she views her mom as the victim. Only at the end of the book, after Mim learns the truth about her mom’s condition, does she realize maybe it hasn’t always been her dad’s fault.

Mim’s road trip to see her mom ultimately becomes a quest to find herself. Along this journey, she gives herself various titles that reflect different parts of her being. These monikers usually manifest when she’s writing letters to Isabel; since these letters are a private space where she’s free to explore her thoughts and feelings, the names she gives herself in them are symbolic of the different ways she feels about herself. For example, in one letter she calls herself the “Cycloptic Wonder” in reference to her blind right eye. By giving herself this name, she’s pointing out the fact that sometimes she feels like a strange monster—a feeling that gets all the more reinforced in her isolation, since she’s never told anyone about her blind eye. In another letter, she calls herself the “Samaritan Avenue Vagabond” (95), a name that references her feelings of being displaced with no sense of home.

Mim also explores her identity in relation to Caleb, with Caleb representing the other side of her dualistic nature. When Mim first realizes that he is schizophrenic, she about the ways in which her dad viewed her—when she played with her toys in different voices, he thought it was a sign of psychosis. Mim wonders if the only thing that really separates her and Caleb is circumstance. In this thought, Mim acknowledges that somewhere inside her, there is the potential to become like Caleb, especially if she were left alone without the love and support of a family.

By the end, Mim’s different perceptions of herself converge in the pivotal scene in which she views herself in her mother’s vanity mirror in the hospital. There is a crack in the middle of the mirror, and when she sees her reflection, it’s split in half by the crack. She calls it “Right Side Mim and Left Side Mim” (329), acknowledging the way her identity feels broken in half—and yet, by looking at these two sides together, she finally starts to feel like this duality makes a whole.