Main Brides can be read as a text that displaces the narrative quest(ion) for/of identity. Rather than dis-covering Lydia's identity, peeling away surfaces for some hidden truth, Gail Scott uses her "narrator" as a fantasizing focalizer in whom a layering or sampling of identities replaces the concept of fixed identity. Lydia becomes an intertextual construct that produces other texts; Lydia's focalization creates a narrative in which identities are not dis-covered as truths but acted out.
