Identity and Selfhood in Self-Portrait with Nothing: The Question of the Real Self

The Thematic Claim: Identity as a Story We Choose to Live With

In Self-Portrait with Nothing, Aimee Pokwatka builds a world where alternate selves are not hypothetical but literal: Ula Frost's portraits pull versions of their subjects from parallel universes into this one. Yet the novel's deepest argument about identity is not that we have multiple selves, but that the self is something we construct—through the stories we tell, the secrets we keep, and the choices we make about which version of ourselves to inhabit. The 'real' self, the novel suggests, is not the one we were born with or the one that exists in some other universe, but the one we choose to live with, day after day, in the world we actually occupy. This claim emerges through Pepper Rafferty's journey from a woman who has built her identity around abandonment and secrecy to one who can accept her mother's love, her own flaws, and the life she has made.

Tracing the Theme Across the Plot

Part One: The Constructed Self (Chapters 1–3)

The novel opens by establishing Pepper's identity as a fortress built from omission. She is a forensic anthropologist who studies bones—the durable remains of bodies, but also, metaphorically, the residue of lives. She has spent her adult life fashioning herself into a person who does not care about Ula Frost, her birth mother, and she is ashamed of the part of herself that still wants Ula's love. When her husband Ike confronts her about keeping her mother's identity secret, Pepper's defense is not denial but deflection: she imagines a universe where she behaved less stupidly, where she said things out loud, where she was 'a totally different person.'

This habit of imagining alternate selves is central to Pepper's identity. Since she was fifteen, she has coped with insomnia by cataloging alternate universes—ones where antibiotics failed, where cancer was cured, where she never met Ike, where she kept the baby from a pregnancy scare. These fantasies are not idle; they are a coping mechanism that allows her to avoid confronting the life she actually has. They also reveal her deepest fear: that she has inherited Ula's instinct to abandon people, and that she tries to make others abandon her first.

The chapter's epigraph—a line from Tomas Tranströmer about preliminary drawings longing to become actual things—sets up the novel's central tension. Pepper's imagined selves are sketches, longing to become real. But the novel will ask whether they should.

Part Two: The Multiplied Self (Chapters 14–15)

When Pepper meets the nine alternate Ulas in the slaughterhouse, the theme shifts from private fantasy to literal reality. Each Ula is a different life path: Blue, the art teacher who named her daughter Frida; Boot, the successful painter who did not keep her baby; Compact, the photographer who was more famous in her own universe than Ula is here; Talons, the choreographer whose pieces made audiences overthrow their lives. They share core traits—a predilection for order, an artistic sensibility, a certain intensity—but their histories diverged at different points.

Boot's story is the most devastating for Pepper. In Boot's universe, Ula got pregnant just as she did, but chose not to keep the child. Boot became successful, with 'no magic, no hiding.' Pepper feels what the text describes as the erasure of a version of herself she had imagined into being—the recognition that in another universe, she was never born, or was never kept. This is the novel's most direct confrontation with the contingency of identity: Pepper exists not because she was meant to, but because one version of Ula made a different choice.

The Ulas also reveal the limits of the 'alternate self' framework. They are not interchangeable; they have different skills, different wounds, different ways of moving. Specs is clumsy and jittery; Key is severe and physically disciplined; Vermont is angry about the children she left behind. They are, in a sense, nine different people who happen to share a face. And yet they are also recognizably the same person—the same core, bent in different directions.

Part Three: The Chosen Self (Chapters 20–22)

The novel's resolution reframes identity as a matter of choice rather than essence. When Ula Zero attacks the painting and Ula reveals Pepper is her daughter, the revelation does not transform Pepper into someone new. Instead, it gives her the information she needs to make a choice about who she wants to be.

Ula's deathbed confession—that she painted many versions of herself out of loneliness—is the key to the novel's thematic claim. Ula did not paint the portraits to create alternate selves; she painted them because she could not bear to be only one person, alone. The portraits were an attempt to escape the self she had made, the self that had abandoned her daughter. But they did not solve her loneliness; they multiplied it.

Pepper's final actions are the opposite of Ula's. She gives each Ula her portrait, explaining that destruction may send them home. She does not try to become a different version of herself. She returns to her life, reconciles with Tilda, plans a collaborative research project to protect Ula's legacy, and helps Specs move into an apartment of her own. She chooses the self she has, with its flaws and its history, rather than the selves she might have been.

Character Connections

The theme of identity is embodied in nearly every major character. Pepper Rafferty is the novel's central case study: a woman who has defined herself by what she lacks (a mother, a stable origin story) and who must learn to define herself by what she has. Ula Frost is the counterexample: a woman who tried to escape her self through multiplication and ended up more alone than ever. The alternate Ulas—Blue and the others—are not just plot devices but philosophical arguments: they prove that identity is contingent, that small divergences produce different people, and that the 'same' person can become a painter, a photographer, a choreographer, or a mother who kept her child.

Ike represents the anchor of chosen identity. He is the person Pepper chose, and who chose her, and his presence throughout the novel—even when they are fighting—reminds her that identity is also relational. Tilda Hogan offers a different model: she stopped speaking to Ula because she could not accept who Ula had become, but she gives Pepper a house key, accepting Pepper as she is. Even Gordon Priddy, Ula's assistant, appears in the opening chapter painting a self-portrait of a man he wishes he were—happier, richer, less alone—demonstrating that the longing for a different self is universal.

Symbol Connections

The novel's central symbol, the painting Self-Portrait with Nothing, is the literal mechanism by which alternate selves enter the world. But its title is the key to the theme: Pepper is 'the nothing'—the absence at the center of Ula's life, the child she abandoned, the self she could not face. The painting is not a portrait of Ula at all; it is a portrait of Ula's loss.

The spider motif appears in the silver spider-shaped earring found at the crime scene where the young woman's remains are discovered. Spiders weave webs—networks of connection—but they are also solitary creatures. The motif suggests the paradox of identity: we are shaped by our connections, yet we experience ourselves alone.

The Polish coin and the blue envelopes both point to the material traces of identity—the objects that connect Pepper to a heritage she never knew and a mother who communicated only through intermediaries. These symbols suggest that identity is not only internal but also external: it is made of the things we leave behind and the things we carry.

Complexity and Contradiction

The novel refuses a simple answer to the question of which self is 'real.' Ula Zero is the original, but she is also the most manipulative and the most damaged. The alternate Ulas are, in some sense, more successful than the original—Boot had the life Ula wanted, Compact was more famous—but they are also stranded, deteriorating, unable to go home. The novel does not rank these selves; it shows that each is a response to circumstances, and that none is inherently more authentic than another.

The deepest contradiction is in Pepper herself. She has built her identity around not needing Ula, but she discovers she wanted Ula's love all along. She is angry at Ula for lying, but she is also angry at herself for wanting the lie to be true. The novel does not resolve this contradiction; it simply lets Pepper live with it.

Study Questions

1. How does Pepper's profession as a forensic anthropologist reflect the novel's treatment of identity?

Pepper studies bones—the physical remains of people who can no longer speak for themselves. Her work is about reconstructing identity from fragments, and the novel suggests that living identity is similarly fragmentary: we are made of the stories we tell, the secrets we keep, and the choices we make, none of which fully defines us.

1. Why does Ula paint the self-portrait that brings an alternate through, and what does this reveal about her character?

Ula paints the portrait while thinking of Pepper, the daughter she abandoned. She realizes she is not painting herself but a version of herself in another place. The painting reveals that Ula's art was never really about self-expression; it was about escape—from loneliness, from guilt, from the self she had become.

1. What does Boot's story reveal about the contingency of Pepper's existence?

Boot is the Ula who did not keep her baby. In her universe, Pepper was never born. Pepper's reaction—feeling the erasure of a version of herself she had imagined into being—forces her to confront the fact that her existence is not inevitable but the result of one woman's choice.

1. How does the novel distinguish between the 'real' self and the 'chosen' self?

The novel suggests that the 'real' self is not a fixed essence but a story we tell about ourselves. The 'chosen' self is the one we actively decide to live with—the self we build through relationships, commitments, and daily choices. Pepper chooses her life with Ike, her work, and her complicated feelings about Ula, rather than fleeing into an alternate universe.

1. Why does Pepper give each Ula her portrait, and what does this action signify?

Pepper gives each Ula her own portrait because she has learned that identity cannot be controlled or contained by another person. The portraits are not the Ulas' true selves; they are Ula's attempts to capture or create selves. By returning them, Pepper acknowledges that each Ula must choose her own identity—and that destruction, not possession, may be the path home.