National Identity and Biopolitics in Clock Without Hands

This article examines Carson McCullers’s Clock Without Hands (1961) as a novel in which the quest for identity is a collective, rather than solely an individual, undertaking. Building on McCullers’s assertion that loneliness constitutes an “American malady” rooted in a “quest for identity,” the article situates this pursuit within the sociopolitical landscape of the 1950s—a period demanding answers not only to “Who am I?” but also to “What are we?” While McCullers’s earlier works often frame identity through the lens of individual alienation, Clock Without Hands foregrounds the existential dilemmas of a collective “us,” shaped by socially and politically constructed divisions of color, gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality. The article argues that biopower operates alongside sovereign and disciplinary power to govern life in the Jim Crow South, revealing how systemic discriminations, such as institutional racism, sexism, and homophobia, shape both group-specific identities and the broader tensions within American national identity. By depicting the intersections of biology and politics, McCullers demonstrates that the lonely “quest for identity” ultimately reflects the contested formation of a collective “we” at a precise historical moment.