Identity in Theodora Sarah Abigail's in the hands of a mischievous god

Ayuningtias, Pradita Aliffia (2025) Identity in Theodora Sarah Abigail's in the hands of a mischievous god. Sarjana thesis, UIN Sunan Gunung Djati Bandung.

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Abstract

Theodora Sarah Abigail’s In the Hands of a Mischievous God frames identity as a process continually reshaped by cultural displacement, inherited memory, gendered constraint, and linguistic negotiation. While personal narrative essays have long been examined for their thematic content, their rhetorical dimensions remain underexplored in the Indonesian Anglophone context. Through close reading and critical discourse analysis, and guided by Erikson’s psychosocial theory, Marcia’s identity status model, and Corbett’s classification of schemes and tropes, this study identifies how Abigail’s essays employ patterned rhetorical expression to construct the speaker’s experience of identity crisis. The findings categorize the rhetorical devices into schemes, which manipulate syntax and arrangement, and tropes, which shift and layer meaning. Within schemes, the analysis distinguishes patterns of repetition, omission and fragmentation, syntactic balance, escalation in intensity, and direct address or questioning; within tropes, it traces substitutions of meaning, contrasts, forms of exaggeration, and personification or layered imagery. Across the essays, these devices appear in recurring patterns that align with key thematic arenas: they convey spiritual doubt and hybrid belief through oscillating rhythms and layered metaphor; render generational memory and family ties with repetition and associative linkage; voice gendered and bodily experiences through syntactic disruption and figurative compression; express diasporic dislocation through contrasts, returns, and juxtapositions; and articulate the narrative self in relation to language through reflexive and self-conscious turns of phrase. In each case, the rhetorical form is inseparable from the act of self-construction, revealing identity as a dynamic negotiation enacted in and through language.

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