58 pages • 1 hour read
I Found You
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Themes
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of emotional abuse, graphic violence, sexual violence, and mental illness.
Memory as the Foundation of Identity
In I Found You, Jewell slowly reveals the hidden identities of Frank/Graham and Carl/Mark. Their cases starkly contrast each other: Frank has lost his memory while Carl hides his past. In the end, Jewell uses these examples to illustrate how identity is multi-layered; truly knowing someone means knowing all the layers of their memories and actions.
When Alice finds Frank, he is in a “fugue state […] a kind of amnesia […] usually caused by an emotional trauma” (36). This state was triggered by Frank seeing Mark, remembering that Mark killed his sister and father, abducting Mark, and strangling him—but Frank’s mind completely blocks these events out. This adds to the memories lost from the events of 1993, removing all sense of who Frank is in the present day.
When Frank regains his memories, he doesn’t like his identity as Gray. This is a nickname he used since he was a teenager. He lived in the grayness of lost identity and in a gray realm of morality: one where he violently takes revenge. So, Gray decides to go by Graham, his birth name. The layers of his identity are represented by his three names. Frank is the essence of himself: a blank slate.
