Nobody's Fool

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death.

The motif of disguises appears throughout the text whenever characters seek to conceal illegal or unethical behavior behind a mask of normalcy, pointing to The Difference Between Appearance and Truth. The story’s central disguise involves Anna, who pretends for years to be Victoria Belmond to conceal that the real Victoria was killed in 1999. Anna and Victoria already look similar, but Anna changes her hair color and wears glasses to heighten the resemblance. Archie Belmond initially shaved Anna’s head and used the shock of her emaciated state to support the fake kidnapping theory, which made people readily accept that Victoria came back after a decade of captivity. Sami easily sees through Anna’s Victoria disguise because of another disguise Anna employed in her past, again covering up a crime. Anna and Buzz used special effect makeup to make Anna appear dead so they could steal Sami’s money. The disguise was so shocking that it imprinted itself in Sami’s mind, allowing him to recognize Anna in a split second after more than two decades.

Sami himself uses disguises to blend in on the New York City streets while he performs what he calls “quasi-Peeping-Tom-ing” (13) for work.