How does My Life As A Fake enrich the notion of trickster?

After a series of readings, rereadings, and creative misreadings, Carey's My Life as a Fake does seem, in many ways, to enrich the notion of trickster through the one thing that sets it apart from traditional trickster tales, the level to which the text itself is in a constant state of becoming. Writing in a multiphrenic world where the concept of truth with a capital T has all but disappeared, Carey adapts legend to fiction, granting his text a level of authenticity while, at the same, leaving it open to continued appropriaton. By creating a cast of characters that are throroughly diaologic, that never limit themselves to one language and one interpretation, Carey leaves each and every character in the text unknowable, and thereby constantly interpretable.

As the main character of the tale, Sarah's language, her level of intimacy with the reader as well as her knowing implications that imply a level of secretiveness, leaves her one of the most interesting personas. While she might not fit the profile of a trickster character in her own right, her life as we know it continues to add more involved levels to the notion of trickster. So, then, the question must be posed. Is Sarah in and of herself a trickster figure, is she "a fake", or is her life a fake?

My Life as a Fake revolves around competing narratives, competing ideas of truth, and competing memories. The art of storytelling leaves its traditional place of confinement within the written word and spreads to memory, to language, and to history. The important question when reading the novel isn't to ask what is true. That can be easily answered--nothing knowable. Rather, the proper question is why are certain things true for certain characters in particular contexts. Such an anlysis, then, would involve a series of questions if we were to come to a conclusion regarding the level to which Sarah is aware of the trickster nature of her narrative, the novel itself.

As for Sarah, then, is the fake the who or the what, in Derrida's terms? Is she intrisically a trickster figure or is her narrative one of a life of decisions based on misinformation, flawed memory? The real issue at stake here, then, is the authority the reader is willing to grant her narratve. Trickster's are much more difficult to pinpoint when they are telling their own story, they are generally identifiable through a narrator whose value system is in conflict with that presented by the figure himself. Coyote doesn't see himself as breaking the rules because he makes his own, but when his tales are told by others they are intrepeted demonstratively because they highlight the clash of value systems. As Sarah's story is being told, then, he perspective is the only one the reader is able to immediately identify with, therefore, while she might be essentially a trickster figure such a reading would necessarily stip her narrative of the kind of authory that is generally granted to a written, first-hand account while problematizing the conscousness level of her manipulations. The first question, then, is unanswerable as far as the text is concerned.

Could the life that she lives be the fake of the title? The answer to that queston, then, is a resounding yes. The problematiation of memory within the text is especially blatant in Sarah's character whose view of the world has historically rested of a misinterpretation (if Slater is to be believed) of her mother's death as well as a reliance on the stories, and therefore memories, of others in her quest for a true interpretation. Such a reliance, then, necessarily implies that she will never arrive at a truth outside of interpretation, one of her greatest fears. Forst, above all, Sarah is a woman of fears. She fears Slater as a sexual predator. She fears the revelation of her lesbian past (and present). She fears the authenticity (or lack thereof) in the stories she is left to rely on (whether that be Chubb's, Slater's, Tina's, or Mrs. Linn's), interprative appropriation of a text outside of authorial intent, and the failure of her journal. More than anything else Sarah wants something to rely on, she wants an open and up front narrative to believe in that is true and that she can, therefore, make informed decisions by trusting. This desire, and her willingness to turn desire into reality in her own mind, doom Sarah to a fake life outside of the realities of a poststructuralistic world in which interpretation and appropraite reside in the language itself that we use to construct the world around us. Without realizing, embracing, and playing with the ambiguity that surrounds her Sarah's life will always be a fake; her reality will be inevitable deconstructed while leaving her with no resources by which to reconconstruct a new notion of reality.