When looked up in the dictionary, the word identity refers to the distinguishing character or personality of an individual that is marked by psychological, social, and cultural factors. That being said, the quest towards finding identity and fully understanding who you are as a person, is never an easy journey, and society has a way of complicating this journey even more. People face different hurdles each day that stand in the way of achieving full happiness and oneness, whether it be in the form of social standards, political norms, cultural differences and expectations, and even racial stigmas. Individuals can face these roadblocks early on in life, possibly as early as elementary school, and all of these challenges make it difficult to reach identity and self-understanding. The poems we studied in class reflect the ways in which society's expectations and social stigmas complicate a person's quest towards identity and true personhood. .
Seamus Heaney's poem, Mid-Term Break, is a great example of how society's expectations can impact identity because the poem is about a young man who is away at school to obtain an education and establish his identity when he is called back home to deal with the death of his younger brother. From reading the poem, it's clear that the narrator left his family to pursue an identity of his own, and the first line of the poem suggests that he isn't happy about having to return home out of obligation as the oldest child. Instead, the line, "I sat all morning in the college sick bay/counting bells knelling classes to a close/at two o"clock our neighbors drove me home," suggests a feeling of impassiveness, almost annoyance that he has to leave his life at school to travel home to console his family. When the reader expects him to be emotionally upset about losing his younger brother, the narrator doesn't seem to feel much of anything besides a sense of burden.