In my reading of the book, it seemed to me that individual identity is one of the themes that pretty much permeates a lot of the interactions of the characters. You have various struggles. You have the struggle of Rand for his own identity. You have various people submerging their identities in either cultural bonds, or you have various bonds, the bonds between the Aes Sedai and the Warders.
It is one of the themes. We like to believe in the United States that we’re a nation of great individualists. And we do have occasional great individualists. By and large, we are a nation of people who bond together in groups and are generally suspicious of anybody in any other group. It’s always been a struggle for Americans, it seems to me, what group to belong to and how far to submerge ourselves in that group. How far do you retain your own thoughts, and how much do you go by received wisdom? Sometimes received wisdom is true, and sometimes it’s not. And it’s difficult sometimes to tell the true from the false.
So, that is all part of it, that struggle, which I play out again and again. Because I’m not trying to give answers here, I’m basically trying to tell a story. And if in telling a story, I can make a few people think about this or that and ask a few questions, I’m really not that interested in what answers they come up with as long as I can get them to ask the questions.
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