Me, Myself and Other Mes

I must speak of myself and of my time in the city of Oxford, even though the person speaking is not the same person who was there. He seems to be, but he is not. If I call myself "I," or use a name which has accompanied me since birth and by which some will remember me... it is simply because I prefer to speak in the first person and not because I believe that the faculty of memory alone is any guarantee that a person remains the same in different times and different places. The person recounting here and now what he saw and what happened to him then is not the same person who saw those things and to whom those things happened; neither is he a prolongation of that person, his shadow, his heir or his usurper.

--Javier Marias, All Souls, quoted in Margaret Atwood's "In search of Alias Grace: On Writing Canadian Historical Fiction."