Identity and Reinvention in Great Circle: The Fluid Self and the Inescapable Past

The Thematic Claim: Identity as Performance, Past as Anchor in Great Circle

The central claim of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle regarding identity is that the self is not a fixed essence but a performance—something constructed through names, roles, and geographies—yet no amount of reinvention can sever the ties to the past. The novel dramatizes this tension through two parallel narratives: Marian Graves, who literally sheds her identity and adopts new names to escape her history, and Hadley Baxter, who tries to rebuild her public persona after a scandal by disappearing into the role of Marian herself. The novel's epigraph—Rilke's poem about living in widening circles—frames this inquiry from the start, asking whether the speaker is a falcon, a storm, or a great song, a question that neither woman can definitively answer.

Marian Graves: The Many Names of a Single Self

Marian's life is a series of reinventions. After surviving her crash and washing ashore on Campbell Island, she spends about ten months recovering, helping with tasks such as shearing sheep and counting albatrosses. In January 1951, she sails to Invercargill and adopts the identity of Martin Wallace, working as a high-country shepherd for three years. Later she becomes Alice Root, buys a farm, and learns to fly a helicopter. Each name is a new skin, a new role that allows her to exist in the world without being the famous—or infamous—Marian Graves.

But the reinvention is never clean. Her final logbook entry, written before her presumed death, reveals the ambivalence at the heart of her project. She notes that her course has been shaped by practical constraints—the locations of islands and airfields, the plane's fuel needs—rather than a straight line. This is a striking metaphor for identity itself: we imagine our lives as direct trajectories toward a chosen self, but in practice we are always diverted by circumstance. Marian's great-circle route is the shortest distance between two points on a sphere, but it is also a curve, never a straight line—a fitting emblem for a life that bends and arcs rather than proceeding directly.

Her logbook entry also expresses a desire for darkness and stars, a longing for something beyond the unending Antarctic daylight. This suggests a restlessness with the self she has become, a desire for transformation or dissolution. And when she considers closing a circle—bringing the end of her travels to meet the beginning—she doubts whether anything can truly be completed. This doubt is crucial: the great circle promises closure, but Marian suspects that closure is an illusion. The past cannot be neatly sealed off; it leaks into the present.

The fact that her logbook is published posthumously as The Sea, the Sky, the Birds Between adds another layer. Even after her death, her identity is being rewritten, reinterpreted, and re-performed by others. The logbook becomes a record of a self that no longer exists, a fixed text that cannot capture the fluid reality of the person who wrote it.

Hadley Baxter: The Actress Who Cannot Stop Performing

Hadley's narrative is the contemporary counterpoint to Marian's. Where Marian reinvents herself by disappearing, Hadley reinvents herself by performing—and the two projects turn out to be surprisingly similar. Hadley's identity has always been constructed: first as Katie McGee, the spunky TV character, then as Katerina, the heroine of the Archangel franchise. When she is publicly shamed after her affair with Jones Cohen, her neighbor Hugo Woolsey tells her this is a golden opportunity to reinvent herself. The word