Elizabeth Costello

In Elizabeth Costello I felt that the question of authenticity was a central concern, as characters grapple with the instability of the ideological frameworks that structure their lives.  This "instability" is apparently inherent in everything that has existential presence extending beyond its corporeality, such that Elizabeth, by the novel's close, admits that even the notion of self-hood falls short of the standards it sets for itself.  Her judges accuse her of changing her story, and so to be able to rectify the discrepancy and thus maintain the appearance of being a single, coherent existent, she must rely on the fact that the self is often self-contradictory and yet still exists nonetheless (221).

But if something can fundamentally compromise itself without in turn negating its presence, there must be some transcendent factor that enables this.  The novel seems to assert the body as being the source of this existential power, as its inarguable presence turns it into the proverbial tortoise's back on which the world can sit.  This seems to be why Elizabeth struggles to accept her surroundings in the afterlife as authentic, as everything there reminds her of someone or something else she seems to have known before but she is never sure who or what.  Being in some kind of wholly metaphysical dimension implies the absence of physical bodies, and thus an absence, on an essential level, of even present-tense experience as being true.

Being free of rules subjected to bodies, like mortality or the need to acquire more resources, means compromising the value of things like time, the normal passage of which is necessary for the thought processes that generate authentic self-experience to occur.  Although this would seem to present a solution (in embodiment) to the questions of meaning posed by existential self-doubt, it seems more accurate to say that the novel insists on the inaccessibility of this meaning.  Since we cannot experience ourselves as mere bodies, but only as embodied selves, we will always be outside of the fundamentally true existence that the body itself insists upon.