“Who Is It Can Tell Me Who I Am?” was first published in the Winter 1995/1996 issue of Ploughshares. It was collected in Women in their Beds: New and Selected Stories (1996). It is currently most readily available in Women in their Beds: Thirty- Five Stories (Counterpoint).

Who is it that can tell me who I am?” King Lear asks plaintively when his once-fawning daughter Goneril mocks him before his hundred knights. It's a cry for identity, and also a plea for connection with and a spark of recognition from a hypothetical Who. Lear is homeless, dispossessed, going mad, and his question is entirely personal—it's not general or philosophical or rhetorical like Hamlet's “What a piece of work is man! … And yet, to me, what is this quintessence of dust?” Lear wants an answer. He desperately needs an answer. Who is it that can tell me who I am?

Gina Berriault's modern version of this hapless, woeful, insistent interlocutor is a young tubercular homeless man in a “badly soiled green parka” who wanders into a library in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco one day. There he encounters Alberto Perera, an elderly librarian, who is immediately afraid that this importuning bum wants to kill him; there have been a series of library arsons and murders of librarians recently up and down the state of California. But the coughing young man has come brandishing, not a weapon, but a poem by the modernist Chilean poet Rubén Dario, scribbled down among a pocketful of scraps of paper. The poem tells various creatures to rejoice in or at least be accepting of their lot in life, and the young man is arguing with the premise somewhat vehemently, and wants Perera to bear witness to this argument and to engage with it. A long conversation ensues, comical at first because Perera continues to think the young man is really there to kill him, and tragic because it soon becomes clear that what the man really wants is for Perera to help him answer, by repudiating the poem's central exhortation to greet the sun from where you lie every morning, a simple and overarching question: Who is he, exactly, if he sleeps on a sidewalk and belongs to no one and nothing?