Individual identity in The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth The idea of ​​the self, an authentic and unique individual identity, seems to be constantly questioned and challenged in The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth. We are presented with several portraits of artists, writers, and aspiring writers, whose notion of self is in some significant way tied to their art. Instead of assembling a unified (rehabilitated?) concept of the self, aesthetic creativity, art, further complicates and problematizes the question of identity. The art simultaneously undermines and underlines the insights provided by a seemingly seamless master narrative. The creative impulses and ideas that inspire an artist to create may have little or nothing to do with the meaning or meanings assigned to the art itself by a virtually infinite chain of interpreters. Writers are thus distanced from their texts at the same time that an audience, a reader, is constructing an identity for themselves and the author based on the text. Nathan Zuckerman, the narrator, is motivated to become a "great" novelist because partly of his romantic notions of writing and writers. His identity is intertwined in the works of EI Lonoff. Nathan rejects his father's pleas to put his identity as a family member and as a Jew before his identity as a writer. Evoking Joyce's Stephen Dedalus, Roth's Nathan Dedalus places his identity as an artist above all other concerns. Look for a new intellectual/spiritual father in Lonoff. First from Lonoff's writings and then from a personal encounter with Lonoff himself, Nathan hopes that by emulating Lonoff in all aspects, he will become more like the idealized identity he has created as his goal. Lonoff... half of the paper. .....sentimental of a larger group, concept, or commodity. This fracture first promoted by his writing is a source of both hope and agony. Amy searches for meaning within her fragmented existence. Where Nathan is brought to the edge of this discovery as the novel progresses, Lonoff retreats from it. Literature is adept at describing and cultivating a fragmented sense of identity; it can motivate others to actions/extremes never sought by the author. Simply put, art encourages interpretation. As writers, each of these three characters is aware that unity or singularity of interpretation is rarely (if ever) achieved. When also applied to an individual identity, such interpretive freedom/ambiguity can be a source of both strength and desperation. The notion of self, although perhaps less complete by the end of the novel, still harbors a potential for meaning.