Before we start to define the illustration of identity and development in the book “Remembering Babylon” of David Malouf, which was published in 1994, we need to give a definition of both of them.
In our opinion the word identity has two different, but both important, meanings. First of all it stand for the collective aspect of the set of characteristics by which a person is recognized, the individuality, which is just your own. Another explanation would be the quality or condition of being the same as something else, which means to have an identity, in every aspect of a being, there must be at least one person or thing with that attribute.
The act of developing is known as a process in which someone passes by degrees a different stage, which means especially a progression from a simpler or lower to a more mature, advanced or complex form.
In the book there are two people who have problems and struggle with their own identity and one person who overcomes a tremendous amount of development.
Jock McIvor, patriarch and father of Janet and Meg McIvor, is nearly the only one to undergo a great development. Through the book he gains a lot in experience, because he is a lot more open-minded than the other settlers. This is already shown in the first chapters, when he agrees to take Gemmy, the savaged “in-between creature” in, “[Gemmy] was taken in by the McIvors, the family of the children who had found him, and given a place to sleep under a red blanket in a lean-to against the side of their hut.”(RB, p.31) Jock is aware of the advantages, but also of the disadvantages Gemmy’s accommodation would implicate, “When he had agreed that first afternoon to take the fellow in, […] he had been acting against his own better judgment. He knew that and had gone right on and let the thing happen.”(RB, p.63) Although his hesitations and the fear of his neighbors’ suspicions he knows subconsciously that the whole family would profit by his arrival. He tries to ease the...