Identity Quotes in The Bourne Identity

The stranger is the guy we've been following from the beginning of the novel, the anonymous dude who got shot and dumped in the ocean. We haven't learned his name—and this is the big reveal where we find out that he doesn't know his name, either.

The novel doesn't always restrict us to the information anonymous dude (later Jason Bourne) knows. For example, later on we get to see Treadstone doing its Treadstone thing, and we see Carlos plotting with his minions, even though Bourne isn't present at those meetings. But here, at the beginning, we only know what Bourne does, so we discover what he knows—and what he doesn't know—at the same time as he does. (See "Why Should I Care?" for more about how we as readers are placed in the same position as Bourne.)

When anonymous dude swims naked to the south of France and pulls himself out of the water, he feels like he's starting a new life. (See also our discussion of "Water.") Oh, and did you notice wordplay here? We don't yet know that anonymous dude's name is "Bourne," so it's easy to miss on a first read-through, but this quote saying that Bourne is "being born" is total foreshadowing: anonymous dude is being born, and the person he'll eventually discover he's being born as is "Bourne."

Throughout the novel, Bourne wavers between wanting to know who he is and deciding that maybe knowing isn't such a great thing after all. This is in part about how self-knowledge is both fascinating and painful. But it's also about how the novel works. Novels work by both revealing truth and concealing it so that the plot can continue to go on. If everything were revealed all at once, Bourne wouldn't actually have a "life," since the novel would end before it began.

Marie is the main proponent in the novel of the idea that identity exists separate from memory, or history. Here (as often in the book) she insists that whatever Bourne was in the past (one of Carlos's soldiers?) he is now the good man she loves. Do you think your identity is tied to your past and to your memories? Or is there something about your identity that goes beyond those things?

Ultimately, the book confirms Marie's view—Bourne turns out to be a good man and not an assassin. Marie's intuition predicts Bourne's past; the past doesn't predict the essence. (Interestingly enough, in the 2002 film version this is not the case—there, Bourne really was an assassin. In the film, losing his memory and past changed who he was. In the book, it does not.)

Here, d'Anjou is describing Delta—the man Bourne was during the Vietnam War, when he worked in Medusa. In some ways, this sounds like a description of the Bourne we know: all men are still his enemies, and he's still very dangerous.The Bourne we read about isn't especially cold, though: he falls in love with Marie readily enough. Did d'Anjou not understand Delta's character? Did the amnesia change Bourne? Did time change him? We never really learn the answers to those questions; some aspects of Bourne's identity remain a mystery to us—and maybe even to him.

That's David Abbott explaining that Treadstone made up the assassin Cain. You could also see it as a description of fiction. Cain is made up—but so is Bourne, and so is David Webb, and so is David Abbott, for that matter. They're all just characters in a book, where every identity is manufactured. Bourne, in fact, is so many levels of made-up that he's like fiction to the fifth power.

Smart economists, Marie insists, don't fall in love with killers (although we're pretty sure that smart economists are capable of doing some really stupid things). Likewise, killers don't offer to sacrifice themselves for smart economists. Marie thinks that your moral character determines your identity absolutely. There's little room here for good people to do bad things, or for bad people to do good things, or for people to be good or bad depending on the situation they're in. Do you think Marie's views sum up the situation in The Bourne Identity, or are things more complicated than that?

This is another big reveal, with Alexander Conklin finally saying the "real" first name of Jason Bourne. It's an example of the way we often find out information about Bourne before he does.

Bourne recognizes that Carlos is someone famous and that the assassin has a different, publically known identity. Realistically, this seems extremely unlikely. Carlos is already a full-time famous fashion designer and a world-renowned assassin. Just in terms of the number of hours in the day, it seems hard to believe he'd have time to have yet another important time-consuming identity as well. Maybe we're just not familiar enough with supervillains.

Psychiatrist Mo Panov explains that Jason Bourne is Everyman, and that we're all searching for our identity. Though hopefully most of us do it without being stalked by international assassins and without killing people, even bad ones…