On The Jellicoe Road Identity Essay

This novel, ‘On the Jellicoe road’, written by Melina Marchetta, is about a 17- year old girl called Taylor Markham, who is the leader of the boarders at the Jellicoe school. She was left at a 7-11 by her mother when she was eleven years old and has never known anything about her family except for the faint childhood memories she has of her mother. Taylor is under a lot of pressure catering to everyone’s’ needs in the boarding house as she’s not a people person, as well as trying to fight the territory wars against Chaz Santangelo and Jonah Griggs, someone she thought she would never see again. At the same time trying to figure out the mysterious stories of her past and how these are related to the strange boy in her dream. While this is all happening, Hannah, the closest person she has ever had to a mother, has disappeared. Taylor has to piece together the parts of her life with the help of her new friends from the townies and cadets in order to find the whereabouts of her mother, her own identity, and what actual happened on that tragic night many years ago.
Identity is an important theme in, On the Jellicoe road, as Taylor had to change her identity many times when travelling with her mother and once she was older she had no idea of all the connections that were around her. It is not until the very end, where all the identities are revealed, that Taylor is able to put together the 5 character’s in Hannah’s manuscript to find out who Hannah, Jude, Fitz, Tate, and Webb really were. This made it difficult when she was growing up since she didn’t know she had so many people to rely