 The pianist represents the woman who is stronger than Edna, able to “soar above…tradition and prejudice.”  Indeed, about Riesz, Arobin says, “I’ve heard she’s partially demented.”  Edna replies, “She seems to me wonderfully sane” (106).  Edna finally decides that she will never be happy in a life role that “feed[s] upon opinion” (117).  In the end, “[t]here was no one thing in the world that she desired.  There was no human being whom she wanted near her…” (138)  She realizes that even her infatuation with the local playboy would be temporary.  This is her epiphany that there is no identity accessible to her, and reconcilable to her, once awake.  In This Boy’s Life: A Memoir, Tobias Wolff recounts a critical period of his youth during which he seeks an identity and therefore, like Edna, he struggles to find his place in the world.  While Edna becomes convinced that there is no place for her in this world, Toby ultimately realizes that the only place he might assume an identity which is true to his self is in the army, apart from his mother and apart from the man she allows to stifle him.  The novel itself barely goes that far – a failed prep school attempt marks the end of this story – but as it is an autobiographical text we should not ignore the author’s life as a larger, relevant context.  Even in isolation the text reveals that the stepfather had to be transcended in order for the boy to even attempt an identity.  The crucial difference between the two stories is that Edna’s husband is ineffective in hindering her search, while Toby’s stepfather Dwight is able to deliberately interfere with the boy’s inner growth.  To illustrate exactly how Wolff reveals that Dwight denied him any identity of his own is not my purpose here, but it is pertinent that getting away from the stepfather was a vital step in the boy’s finding his place in the world.  The stories both reveal a resolution which almost declares, “To thine own self be true!”  Edna resolves her personal existential conflict by swimming forever into the ocean, a fate that satisfies her on a self-derived level, and Toby only ever feels truly himself in the role of a soldier with a gun (maybe he gets it from his mother, who is a gun expert), thus his resolution is more than freeing himself from Dwight or from the powerlessness of childhood, and it is more than becoming an illusion that is viewed as praiseworthy, such as a prep-school student; it is to become a subject of the U.S. military.  Biographically speaking, we are able to see that in maturity he continues to self-actualize into roles which fit into society.  His thwarted aspiration to participate in the prestigious academic world becomes fulfilled later on with his position at Stanford University, and his undeveloped childhood interest in writing is fulfilled by the success of his novels. 