Significance of The Artist

The artistic identity, as characterized in the novel, symbolizes the conflict between creative brilliance and erratic stability. The author evokes the artistic identity as a defined and specific category of human, one who lives an exciting and interesting life and imagines an “alternative order” for conventional systems (36). Yet the artist is also portrayed as “destructive” and unstable, someone who in a pursuit for creative expression, ruptures the solidity around them (198).