The subject of the study is the artistic representation of the identity crisis of the main character in O. Sudzhik's novel "Sympathy" – a twenty-three-year-old British woman, Alice Hay, a representative of the millennial generation. In recent decades, the millennial generation (born 1982–2002) has attracted the attention of not only sociologists but also literary scholars, as it embodies the symbol of the new millennium, a time when humanity stepped into the digital age and traditional social norms began to change rapidly. The analyzed work is referred to by literary critics as “the first significant Instagram novel” due to the author's ability to innovatively integrate the aesthetics of social networks into the narrative fabric and to raise relevant issues of internet addiction, data capitalism, and the influence of technology on identity. The aim of the study is to identify the features of the author's interpretation of the identity crisis facing millennials. The article employs a systematic methodological approach based on a combination of the following methods of literary analysis: biographical, cultural-historical, and comparative. The author analyzes the poetics of the heroine's name, the symbolic imagery, intersexual characteristics, and the chronotope. To date, O. Sudzhik's debut novel "Sympathy" (2017) has not been translated into Russian and is being analyzed in its original language for the first time in domestic literary studies, which defines the scientific novelty of the conducted research. As a result, it has been established that the identity crisis of the heroine is determined by the impossibility of integrating the disparate layers of her multidimensional "self" (narrative, virtual, and sociocultural). The millennial simultaneously exists in multiple spaces, breaking down the continuum of subjectivity. The fragmentation of identity arises from the displacement of authentic layers of experience by virtual narratives from social networks and simulacra, forming a false perception of reality where illusion is accepted as authenticity, leading to existential emptiness. This process is determined by global shifts in the digital age of the 21st century, which are disrupting traditional models of subjectivity and worldview.
Svetlana Vasil'evna Lyubeeva (Sun,) studied this question.