Billy Summers

Billy Summers is deeply invested in questions of identity: how people form identities and how (or if) they can relinquish them. Billy’s stint in Red Bluff is described as his “season of many identities” (96). On the most basic level, this refers to the various aliases and false identities that characters assume in this novel. Few of the central characters have only one name. Giorgio is also known as Georgie Pigs, Frank is also Frankie Elvis, Alice becomes Elizabeth Anderson, Bucky’s real name is Elmer, and Billy himself has numerous identities, including David Lockridge and Dalton Smith. The characters in Billy’s book sometimes bear the names of their real-world counterpart, and sometimes Billy masks them with invented names. Identities also flow between people. At one point Billy confuses Hoff with Foss, a CIA man in Fallujah, and he reflects of Alice that “He doesn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him what she means to him; she’s a version of Cathy only grown up” (286).

In addition to these named identities, different aspects of characters emerge throughout the book. Billy has a “dumb self” introduced in the very first chapter and a “child self” who begins to emerge through his writing. Likewise, Billy’s aliases become sites for suppressed aspects of his personality to flourish.