Living Anonymity: Exile as Motif in Lenrie Peters’ He Walks Alone

Exile is strangely compelling to think about but terrible to experience.  It is the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted. And while it is true that literature and history contain heroic romantic, glorious, even triumphant episodes in an exile’s life, these are no more than efforts meant to overcome the achievements of exile permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind for ever. (Edward Said, 2001:137)