There is nothing ready-made about the eight stories in I, etcetera. Indeed the question of signature, of putting together an identity, is explicitly raised, and even when the characters worry about their facelessness, this preoccupation itself, and the writing which displays it, clearly wear the faces Sontag has chosen to give them. A man in one of the stories hands over his life to a dummy because he is "tired of being a person": "Not just tired of being the person I was, but any person at all." Simone Weil is quoted as saying that the only thing more hateful than a "we" is an "I"; and at another point this savage old question is fired off: "Who has the right to say 'I'?" The assertion of self is an ugly and dangerous habit, but the suppression of self is a feeble-hearted error. On this shifting terrain we...