Art's Identity In Making It Home By Wendell Berry

In Wendell Berry’s “Making it home,” he uses the contrast in the character’s identity to demonstrate a change. The story follows the character Art, a man with three identities. Berry demonstrates Arts identities as a way to portray the progression of his rebirth by characterizing Art’s three stages of life; the soldier, the man and the farmer.
Berry uses the contrast of Art’s life as a soldier to establish a change in his identity. Wendell Berry presents the difference in Art’s walking as a renewal of life, “I reckon I am done marching, have marched my last step, and now I am walking. There is nobody in front of me and nobody behind. I have come here without a by-your-leave to anybody” (85). The change in Art’s walking as characterized by Berry describes a sense freedom; there is no structure that he has to follow. In the sense of freedom, Berry over exaggerates the fit of Art’s uniform, “The uniform he wore as he walked along the road between Jefferson and Hargrave was now too big for him. His shirt was too loose on his neck, in spite of the neatly tied tie, and under his tightened belt the waistband of his pants gathered in pleats” (89). The over exaggerated fit of the army uniform represents the shift from Art’s past to his future. He suggests a rebirth of Art, “And now, though he walked strongly enough along the road, he was still newborn from his death, and inside …show more content…
The description of the change in Arts walk demonstrates his contrasting identities as, “He walked too like a man who had been taught to march, and he wore a uniform. But whatever was military in his walk was an overlay, like a uniform, for he had been a man long before he had been a soldier, and a farmer long before he had been a man” (84). The contrasts that Berry makes using all three of Art’s identities on his journey home was a way of working out who he