Man vs. Monsters: The Problem of Identity in Pew and Undertale

There is a problem with identity. Although people tend towards identifying themselves as something absolute, identity does not coincide with itself. This leaves people's sense of identity open to manipulation and exploitation. In this thesis, I explore how Catherine Lacey's novel Pew and Toby Fox's video game Undertale deal with this problem. Both works trouble the notion of a stable, internal identity that can be expressed through clean-cut identity categorisations, showing how such a view of identity is unrealistic, restrictive, and potentially harmful. I draw inspiration from Michel Foucault's treatment of art in his Order of Things, in which Foucault gives art the privileged position of being able to foretell a shift in epistemes. Analysing Pew and Undertale alongside the concept of genre as theorised by Jacques Derrida and the concept of the monster as grounded in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's writing, I show that these works prefigure an episteme that expects difference rather than...Show moreThere is a problem with identity. Although people tend towards identifying themselves as something absolute, identity does not coincide with itself. This leaves people's sense of identity open to manipulation and exploitation. In this thesis, I explore how Catherine Lacey's novel Pew and Toby Fox's video game Undertale deal with this problem. Both works trouble the notion of a stable, internal identity that can be expressed through clean-cut identity categorisations, showing how such a view of identity is unrealistic, restrictive, and potentially harmful. I draw inspiration from Michel Foucault's treatment of art in his Order of Things, in which Foucault gives art the privileged position of being able to foretell a shift in epistemes. Analysing Pew and Undertale alongside the concept of genre as theorised by Jacques Derrida and the concept of the monster as grounded in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's writing, I show that these works prefigure an episteme that expects difference rather than sameness, reconfiguring the problem of identity into a source of possibilities.Show less

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Man vs. Monsters: The Problem of Identity in Pew and Undertale