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Quest for Identity - TV Tropes
A dead person.
"This story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature."
— Northrop Frye, The Educated Imagination
An Amnesiac Hero wakes up stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no recollection of who they are. The plot involves, at least in part, their efforts to (re)discover the identity they cannot remember. Amnesiac Dissonance may make this unwise.
The hero may suffer Trauma-Induced Amnesia and their journey to find themselves includes confronting their emotional baggage.
These stories tend to involve: Identity Breakdown, if the search or the identity they've found, becomes too mentally taxing to bear; I Am Who?, if the identity they remember is special or The Chosen One; Amnesiac Costume Identity if they incorrectly assume the clothes they're wearing belong to them or are related to their true identity; Tomato in the Mirror if their identity happens to be a fake of some sort or the bad guy that everyone has been looking for; and The Killer in Me, if they find out they're a killer, which may or may not make them a Villain Protagonist, depending on who they kill.
This is a Sub-Trope of Ontological Mystery. See also Loss of Identity and Identity Amnesia. The Amnesiac Lover may want to do this to remember why they loved whom they've forgotten.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Angel Beats! begins with Otonashi waking up without any memories. He joins the SSS not because of any particular commitment to Yuri's mission, but in the hope that his memory will eventually return.
- In Ceres, Celestial Legend, Tooya's main motivation for working with the Mikages is to find out who he is.
- Dangaioh: The four ESP'ers (Mia, Pai, Lambda and Roll) all suddenly find themselves in service to Dr. Tarsan without knowing who they are/were, or how they got there. Mia vaguely recalls that she's a normal girl from Earth, so they decide to fight their way there to live in peace. As the story advances, the other three begin to remember their pasts. And they're not pretty.
- Eden of the East starts our amnesiac protagonist off in front of the White House with nothing more than a handgun and a cellphone (albeit one with eight billion yen on it) to go by. "Nothing," in this case, includes clothes.
- Ergo Proxy: Starting with episode four, the series takes an Ontological turn, changing from a story about a Goth girl detective trying to figure out the connection between the monsters and the corrupt Bureaucracy, to a story about what was apparently a minor character but not really trying to remember his past.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: JoJolion has the main character, Josuke Higashikata (also called Gappy) looking for his identity for most of the part. He's a lovable idiot who doesn't know who he is and somehow brings down a whole fruit-smuggling operation in the process of finding his true identity.
- Halfway through the first season of K, Shiro realizes that all of his memories are false, and he has no idea who he really is. The first thing he remembers is being kicked out of an airship and crash landing in the school's gym. From then on, he not only has to clear his name, he also has to figure out who he truly is. Of course, the two goals end up being connected...
- Kaiba: One day a young man wakes up in an empty room, with no idea of who or where he is. His only clues are a strange marking on his stomach, a hole in his chest, and a locket containing a blurry picture of a girl. Kaiba travels from planet to planet, seeking for who he is and who the girl in the locket is.
- In Kemono Friends, the main character is hoping to remember what kind of animal she is. She's the last human...probably.
- In Noir, the subplot of who the hell Yuumura Kirika is drives the action for the beginning of the series. A subversion, since near the end Kirika doesn't really seem to want to find out about her past, and would rather just make tea for her 'partner'.
- In the Yu-Gi-Oh! second series, it's revealed that Yugi's dark side is the reincarnation of a Pharaoh who's lost his memories. The Pharaoh then enters the Battle City Finals to gain the three Egyptian God cards he needs to enter the Millennium World where he can find his identity.
Comic Books
- In the 2000 AD story The Dead Man, a young boy finds the burned body of a stranger in the wilderness and takes him back to his village. He can't even remember his name, but he turns out to be damn good with a gun and is being pursued by evil spirits from beyond. After healing sufficiently, the man goes on a journey to find out who he is. He's Judge Dredd.
- In Astro City, Beautie has no memories of a time before she flew over a meadow. She periodically tries to fix this — having difficulty because her Laser-Guided Amnesia keeps erasing what she learned.
- Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW) introduces Surge the Tenrec, who (alongside her sidekick Kitsunami the Fennc) had been turned into a cyborg by Dr. Starline as part of Operation: Remaster, with no memory of her past. Noticing that certain details weren't adding up, she tried to look up her own background during a lull between missions, only to find that Starline did not consider the past details of his subjects relevant. Surge reasons that whether she volunteered or was kidnapped to become a cyborg, the world simply didn't care about her fate, so she vows to destroy the world to avenge her Loss of Identity.
- Who Is Donna Troy? is the end of Wonder Girl's quest for identity. Wonder Woman rescued her from a building on fire when she was a baby and took her to the Amazon Island, and Donna grew up without knowing who her real parents were, what her birth name was, or anything previous to the fire.
- XIII starts with the main character washing up on a shore with a bullet wound to the head. When he wakes up, he has no idea who he is and no clue, except for "XIII" tattooed on his chest.
Fan Works
- Always Visible: In some ways, Jordan Thurlow and Delia herself are asking these questions.
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic The Changeling of the Guard, this forms the crux of Idol Hooves's journey post-exile, though it takes him a long time to realize it for himself.
- In the WWE fanfic, Miss Molly's Wild Ride, Molly Holly gets amnesia after getting trampled by fans during a match that went into the crowd. The only thing she remembers is the face of the last person she saw before she lost consciousness, Jeff Hardy.
- Little Hands, Big Attitude: Shadow has complete amnesia after Rouge breaks him out of his cryostasis chamber, so he embarks on a quest (following the guidance of a mysterious voice and whatever little fragmented memories he has) to figure out his past and who he wants to be.
- In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Izuku goes looking for his spaceship after All Might inspires him to become a Hero in hopes of coming to terms with himself. This ends up overtaking Izuku's better judgment, as he inadvertently places the Pro Hero Firestorm in harm's way when he refused to evacuate what was most likely the lair of a Villain, causing Firestorm to get stabbed in the leg.
- Basically applies in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer/Angel fic "The Night Remembers"; after Buffy is brought back to life following her death fighting Glory, she is resurrected with no conscious memory of her past, only starting to regain her old memories after Angel returns to her life.
- PMD: The Rogue Team has Erin, a human that wakes up in the pokemon world transformed into a fennekin with no memory of her past. With her mind a clean slate, she believes this couldn't have happened in a normal way. Erin's major goal is recovering her memories.
Film — Live-Action
- Captain America: The Winter Soldier: After Steve's "I Know You're in There Somewhere" Fight in the climax helped him to somewhat overcome his brainwashing, the Winter Soldier embarked on a quest to learn about his old self, Bucky Barnes.
- The lead character of Cowboys & Aliens literally wakes up at the beginning of the film stranded in the middle of nowhere, with no recollection of who he is or how he got to his current location.
- Dark City (1998): A man wakes up in a bathtub with no memories —- he doesn't even recall that his name is John Murdoch until he checks his wallet. He finds a dead woman in the bedroom, and the phone is ringing. His burning need to know who he is is fundamental to the story.
- The Dead Pit's Final Girl arrives at the mental hospital setting amnesiac and a portion of the plot is donated to find out her identity and her connection to the Big Bad.
- In-between the themes of race relations in The New '10s, Dear White People is, at its core, a story of how we see ourselves based on our morals, our opinions, and how other people see us.
- Memento: This trope is deliberately inverted; the protagonist has anterograde amnesia instead of Laser-Guided Amnesia. He knows who he is and where he's from, but he can never remember what happened mere minutes ago, always living in an eternal present.
- Mulholland Dr.: A woman has amnesia after what seems to be a car accident. Recovering herself is not ontologically safe.
- Paycheck has a variant: The protagonist knows who he is, but the entire last two years of his life are a total blank. He apparently agreed to have this done by his employer, and would probably have left well enough alone if not for the government wanting to interrogate him about what he was doing during that time.
- A non-action version is Regarding Henry, starring Harrison Ford. In it, the title character survives a gunshot wound to the head, and the resulting pinched artery affects his memory. Cue the rest of the movie depicting him coming to terms with not remembering anything about his life before the shot. Note that it's a rare ontological mystery for the character only, not the audience, hence the reason that it's played for drama rather than excitement.
- Much of the film RoboCop (1987) revolves around Murphy trying to remember who he was in his past life and getting revenge on the criminals who killed him.
- Both adaptations of Solaris feature Hari/Rheya undergoing some sort of quest like this. It pretty much jumps from Hari spending most of the film completely amnesiac, to her feeling a bit angsty over identity issues, to trying to kill herself in about 20 minutes. The 1972 film is 3 hours long.
- Trap for Cinderella: Micky starts believing that she's really Do and investigates, with the facts piling up showing this is the case. It turns out that she really is Micky.
- The plot of Unknown (2006), where a group of five men find themselves trapped in an Abandoned Warehouse with no memory of who they are. The tricky thing is, they know that at least two of them are kidnap victims and the others are the kidnappers. The movie explores how they slowly regain their memory.
Gamebooks
- All-Day Nightmare begins with you waking up in an abandoned house instead of your bedroom, and you have no idea who you are or how you got here. Thanks to Schrödinger's Gun, you are either an alien abductee who got your mind erased, a werewolf turning back to human, or a government secret agent who underwent memory erasure.
- A couple Fighting Fantasy books, notably Creature of Havoc and Black Vein Prophecy, begins with you having zero memory of your past, and must find out the truth as the adventure progresses. In the former? You're not even human.
Literature
- Brandy from the Astral Cafe series goes on various quests for her identity throughout the series, however to date they have all been unsuccessful.
- Bob Nine by Gregg Haugland is about a man who suffers recurring bouts of amnesia. As the title suggests, this is his ninth experience with this, and he discovers that his previous selves have established a system of leaving information for him about who he is and why this is happening. None the less, every incarnation of him ends up with a subtly different personality based on their experiences during the brief time they have before the next big memory erasure.
- The Chronicles of Amber. Corwin awakes in a mental hospital with zero knowledge of his identity. This is essential to the plot: a core of the first five books is a parallel journey of the reader and Corwin to discover who he is. Corwin's lack of memory is rich narrative fodder: old enemies are dangerously mistaken as friends, but some bitter enemies of old are met without prejudice, allowing for reconciliations, even friendships that would be impossible otherwise.
- Tzigone from Counselors and Kings. She puts things together piecemeal throughout the trilogy, only learning the final bit - her real name - during the climax.
- Dragons Can Only Rust and Dragon Reforged by Chrys Cymri are about a robot dragon on a quest to learn whether or not he has a soul.
- Family Skeleton Mysteries: The first book's mystery begins as this, with Sid trying to find out who he was when he was alive, and soon adds Whodunnit to Me? to the mix.
- In Fate/strange Fake, Flat Escardos summons Jack the Ripper as his Berserker for the Snowfield Holy Grail War. However, unlike the Fate/Apocrypha version, this Jack isn't a specific person, but rather, an embodiment of the legend of the first serial killer. This has advantages and drawbacks; since Berserker has no real identity, one of his Noble Phantasms enables him to assume any of the possible identities the true Jack might have been — a doctor, a prostitute, a butcher, a rogue magus, a coordinated group of murderers, a demon, a group of demons... Since they only have the barest hints of who they truly are, they plan on wishing on the Grail for the true knowledge of Jack the Ripper's identity.
- Subverted in Azure Bonds from The Finder's Stone Trilogy, in which the heroine awakens in an inn with some, but not all, of her memories missing, only to discover over the course of the novel that her memories are fake, and that she is in fact a rogue magical construct that was only built a few weeks ago.
- The Redfern Barrett novel Forget Yourself is set in a land where no-one has any clear memories of the outside, and society must be rebuilt from scratch.
- In The Girl from the Miracles District, Robin's side of the plot is the mystery of who and what he is.
- In Mirror Dance, Miles Vorkosigan goes through several chapters not knowing who he is, due to amnesia induced by him being killed, frozen, and then revived. His doctors have some idea who he is, but since he has a clone, and they believe the rumor that says he has two clones, they're not sure which he is.
- Night Gem tackles this trope quite literally as the protagonist discovers an ancient classification system of archetypes and tries to find out how she fits into it.
- In The Saga of Darren Shan, Darren's best friend Harkat is a strange, stitched together being who knows that he was a person who died and came back to life, but with no memory of who he was before he died. All along, he has known that in order to find out who he was, he has to stay by Darren's side. In book 10, they go through a strange portal into who-knows-where to finally discover Harkat's "impossibly familiar" true identity.
- In The Scavenger Trilogy by K. J. Parker, Poldarn awakes facedown in the mud, surrounded by dead soldiers. He has no idea who he is. The remainder of the series has Poldarn striving to reclaim his lost past, yet running from the nightmare his past is revealed to be.
- Played with in the Venus Prime series, where Sparta is aware that she used to be Linda Nagy, daughter of a pair of behavioral scientists, but can't remember anything about the three years prior to her waking up in a mental hospital.
Live-Action TV
- The plot of the Banjun Drama episode "She's Suspicious" centers around a woman with Identity Amnesia and her husband, both of whom are trying to figure out who she was in the past. With her ability to fight, shoot guns, and use knives, along with her nightmares that seem to be memories of the past, the wife and husband both begin to suspect that she was a gangster or in some other violent profession.
- In the Black Mirror episode "White Bear", the protagonist wakes up in a house surrounded by pills with no memory of who she is and a crazed maniac trying to kill her.
- The center of Blindspot: A woman is left in a duffel bag in Times Square with no memory of who she is or why her whole body is covered in mysterious tattoos. The tats help the FBI solve cases while the woman, with the temporary identity of Jane Doe, helps them in the hope of finding clues to her past.
- Choushinsei Flashman: The five rangers were abducted by aliens when they were kids and return to earth as adults and try to find their missing families. Ultimately the rangers are forced to return to space due to their bodies no longer being compatible with earth and by that time only one of the rangers managed to find their family.
- Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor has amnesia when he wakes up in the TV movie. In this case, the audience already knows everything about him, though.
- Dollhouse: In one episode, Echo and three other Actives awaken in their sleep chambers with their functional but not declarative memories intact. In addition to the usual quest for identity, this also adds an Ontological Mystery into the plot, because the dollhouse would be a very unusual setting for a normal person to wake up in, what with the commercialized mind control and stuff. Naturally, they go hunting for who they are and the people who did this to them. It's all a set-up by the Dollhouse to fix a glitch in the brainwiping process; they learn a little but none of them manage to have their memories restored, and as soon as they accomplish whatever minor goal they were after, they black out as they were preprogrammed to do and are wiped again.
- John Doe with a twist. The titular character is a walking encyclopedia of the combined knowledge of the human race. The only thing he can't remember is who he is.
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Build: Sento Kiriyu became Build to protect people from Smash and to find his memories (and the person who took them).
- Kamen Rider Decade: Tsukasa Kadoya sets out on the journey across the Another Rider worlds to find the one he belongs to and his identity.
- The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: The Stranger is an amnesiac Ambiguously Human who fell from the sky near the Harfoot camp. When he wakes up all he knows is that he must find a certain constellation, but other than that, he doesn't know from where he is, what he is and or to speak. He gets mistaken for an amnesiac Sauron by three worshipers from Rhun, and fighting them he learns he is a wizard. With the help of Nori Brandyfoot, he travels to Rhun in the search of said constellation, hoping to learn why was he sent to Middle-earth.
- One episode of MacGyver (1985) involved Mac developing amnesia after getting shot and thrown out a window into the bay. While trying to figure things out, he can initially only remember a bunch of explosions from previous episodes. He therefore assumes he's a criminal. Then, the bad guy shows up and tells him that he works for military intelligence. This story falls apart because they give him a gun and try to have him kill his friend/boss Pete Thornton. Pete manages to make MacGyver realize that he Doesn't Like Guns.
- Nowhere Man: The main character thought he was a photographer whose life had been taken away. Granted, he starts the series thinking he knows who he is and what he does ... "and in one instant, it was all taken away", if I remember the dialogue right.
- The Outer Limits (1963): This is a major feature of the very famous "Demon with a Glass Hand" episode.
- The Outer Limits (1995):
- In the episode "Birthright", a politician gets into a car accident and lose his memory. He is immediately told who he is but starts to see strange things. He suspects and alien conspiracy only to find out that he himself is an alien and, in fact, the aliens are already growing a replacement for him.
- In the episode "Blank Slate", a man is being chased by some people. He encounters a woman who agrees to help him. He can't remember who he is but has a strange case with him that periodically dispenses a shot of a blue liquid. With every shot, he regains some of his memories. In the end, he takes the last shot and remembers that those people chasing them are working for him. He is a Mad Scientist who created this method of erasing, storing, and restoring memories. The end of the episode shows him about to do this to the woman who helped him.
- Ressha Sentai ToQger: The rangers realize in the second episode that they have lost almost all of their memories. They remember being friends with each other when they were kids, but nothing else. They can't even remember their own surnames. They spend the show slowly regaining their lost memories and trying to find their missing hometown.
- Chester Tate from Soap goes on one of these after he loses his memories in season two after his surgery for his brain defect that had been causing him blackouts and amnesia.
- Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes "Transfigurations" and "Conundrum".
Theatre
- Jane Doe in Ride the Cyclone, the victim of the rollercoaster crash who was decapitated and whose dead body was never claimed or identified. While in limbo, she still does not remember who she was, only how she died. Her song, "The Ballad of Jane Doe," laments that if she isn't chosen to be resurrected, she'll die nameless and forgotten. This is ultimately why Ocean chooses her for a second chance at life instead of any of the other characters, as the others have memories to bring to the afterlife, but Jane Doe has none.
Toys
- BIONICLE's Takua. After already having had his memory and identity wiped twice, Takua managed to land on his head and erased his identity again. What followed was a long quest to try and piece together who he is, all the while learning of the Legend of Bionicle, and helping his people fight against darkness.
Video Games
Webcomics
- This is ultimately why Red XIII Face Heel Turned in Ansem Retort; to find out more about himself, his race (of which he's the Last of His Kind), and how the fuck humans managed to get superior over them anyway.
- In A.P.O.C, having no prior knowledge of the first twelve years of her life, this is the only thing Clara cares about. For now.
- The inhabitants of The Ends are reborn without memories in an endless cycle. The protagonist, Jason, has managed to recover a portion of his identity and is now questing for the remainder.
- Subverted in Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name — the narrator, a zombie, woke up ten years ago with no memory of his past life or even his name. Instead of going on a quest for identity, however, he spent those years wandering and contemplating life and has joined Hanna in his supernatural investigations for something to do rather than finding out why he's come back to life. He has shown relatively little interest in his past identity and has even stated in the artist's Q&A that if he remembered the identities and address of his family, he probably wouldn't go see them - it would be too cruel to them.
- I'm the Grim Reaper: Played for horror, as god has allowed Earth to become a Crapsack World for the sole purpose of finding out who they used to be.
- Iris Brockman in Tales Of Gnosis College averts this trope. In spite of a bizarre sequence of events involving total physical discontinuity with her past self, she has no doubts as to who she is.
Web Original
- Both the main characters of Ruby Quest. As well as just about everyone else, apparently.
- Stone Burners, starts off like this. The protagonist ends up adopting "Olivia" as a name while she figures out who she is, or was.
Web Animation
- In Red vs. Blue, after discovering that he's actually an amnesiac AI, dying, and being resurrected via an AI based on his memories, Church spends Season 8 trying to figure out who and what he is.
Western Animation
- Action Man (1995): The Action Man has no memories of his past life. The now-notorious DVD Action Man:Past Performance indicates this.
- The Owl House: For much of the first season, King is convinced that he is the literal "King of Demons" who lost his powers. Season 2's Echoes of the Past reveals that King was not the King of Demons at all, and all his memories were just delusions that Eda indulged in a misguided attempt at making him happy. King's story arc for the rest of the show focuses on his quest to find out about his origins, culminating in the reveal that he is the son of none other than the Titan himself.
- Winx Club: Bloom, having lost her memory upon being sent to Earth as a baby and grew up as an Ordinary High-School Student, spends the early seasons of the show learning her true family heritage; that she's the last remining survivor of the planet Domino, her biological parents are King Oritel and Queen Marion, she's the bearer of an ancient powerful magic called the Dragon's Flame, and especially to track down the location of where her birth parents are.
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