Sam I Ain't

Y'know, I was reading Green Eggs and Ham to my son (see icon) the other day, and I realized that the most important message wasn't one of being foodventurous (cool term, BTW). It's a message of identity and attachment.

We all know the name of the guy pushing the GE&H: Sam I Am, right? And everyone else in the story is identified as *something*, at the very least--box, fox, house, mouse, train--except for our protagonist. He's got no name. His species is indeterminate. We don't know anything about who or what he is, only that he won't eat GE&H, and the fact that he's annoyed by SIA.

And of course, we learn through the story that he is deeply, strongly identified with the fact that he hates GE&H, even though he's never tried it. It's an attachment that keeps him from living his life, because he spends all but two of the pages of the book--the beginning, where he expresses his disdain for SIA, and the end, where he expresses his love for GE&H--defending that (non-) identity.

And at the end, after wasting time and energy, after causing a train rain boat moat disaster, he ends up not only trying GE&H--and look at the defeated look on his face when he does so--but actually LOVING it, declaring all that had been true to suddenly be untrue. It was a total personality shift.

Except for one thing. He doesn't say that he loves SIA, and based on the fact that he hated SIA right from the start, this isn't the first time that they've had this interaction, and it won't be the last. And based on the fact that SIA never loses his faith in his ability to convert no-name, my guess is that other interactions have ended up the same way, with no-name clinging to some shred of identity which still, pages later, slips away.

The lesson, I told my son, is not to be willing to try anything, but to know himself and to be wary of the motivations of others who are trying to influence you. Sam I Am could have been a pusher, saying that no-name needed to try Giggly Extacy and Heroin, or God, Ecclesiastes and Heffalumps and no-name let himself be worn down. Of course he was happy with the new experience which turned out be not as bad as he had made it out to be (how could it have been?), but having lost that last shred of identity, his soul was that much more empty and easy for SIA to claim the next time around.