Ornithology and Ontology: The Existential Birdcall in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea and Anna Kavan's Who Are You?

This essay explores textual parallels between Anna Kavan's novel Who Are You? (1963) and Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea (1966). Paying close attention to the interrogative birdcall that haunts both texts, it examines how (post-)colonial situations and the experiences of namelessness and marital sexual violence lead Rhys's and Kavan's protagonists to doubts about their identity and existence.