Always Remember, Anakin: Your Identity Determines Your Reality

How does Anakin Skywalker turn into Darth Vader?

As we gathered proposals for writing Star Wars and Conflict Resolution: There are Alternatives to Fighting,, it seemed as if half of our prospective authors wanted to focus a chapter on this question from a host of different conflict perspectives. We could only include a few of these in the book, but each one was a doozy.

In this post I’ll discuss one of these. In her chapter “Who’s Your Daddy? Identity, Conflict, and the Transformation of Darth Vader”, Danielle Blumenberg explains how Anakin’s decisions and behavioral choices shape his sense of identity throughout the prequels.

Identity has four dimensions: autonomy, community, intimacy, and meaning. Anakin starts out as a slave on Tatooine. At this point in his life, Anakin is self-assured, confident, and giving. Despite being a slave, as Blumenberg points out, Anakin’s identity needs are met. He has a sense of community with the other slaves, autonomy through pod racing, intimacy with his relationship with his mother, and meaning by fixing things for his mother.

Later, though, Anakin becomes a Jedi-Padawan and starts having to deal with significant identity-related issues. He does not know his place within the Jedi Order and struggles with autonomy issues because he needs to follow the collective will of the Jedi Council. He struggles with community not only because he is the Chosen One (which sets him apart) but also because the Jedi Order was reluctant to take him on as a Padawan at all. Imagine all the finger-pointing there must have been as he walked into the Temple’s cafeteria each morning. You’d think time would help with all this, but it really didn’t; subsequent events kept Anakin’s identity in turmoil. Following the deaths of Shmi Skywalker and Qui-Gon Jinn, he loses his parental figures and a large part of his intimacy. Eventually Anakin, in an attempt to satisfy his need for intimacy and meaning, sacrifices his autonomy to the will of Darth Sidious in an attempt to gain back some of his lost community, intimacy, and meaning.

Ultimately, Anakin effectively becomes the opposite of his former sense when he is given the name Darth Vader. He defines himself not in terms of what he is but what he is not. Negative identity is when we define ourselves in relation to some other supposed evil. In Anakin’s case, this evil shifts from the Sith to the Jedi, and he begins defining himself as “not Jedi” (but in a very different and far more ominous way than Ahsoka identifies herself as being “not a Jedi”…). It is only much later that the arc of the saga has Anakin returning to his old identity — away from Darth Vader — by way of Luke’s efforts to restore the father-son relationship, thus drawing on the core identity needs of intimacy and meaning.

— Written by Max Lentz, SW&CR Padawan and 3L student at the University of Oregon School of Law