Identity and Self-Esteem Theme Analysis

In many ways, Fish in a Tree is a classic coming of age novel: over the year that Ally spends in Mr. Daniels's classroom, she transforms from a withdrawn, anxious, and poor student to one that is confident, feels connected to her classmates, and can think hopefully about her future. Ally is able to do this primarily because, for the first time in her school career, she has a teacher who tells her that she's smart in a different way, which Ally eventually comes to believe herself. Through Ally's journey, the novel suggests that a person's identity is made up of stories that they tell about themselves and that others tell about them, and that those stories become true when they're repeated often enough—but also, that a person's identity can change when they change those narratives.

Ally's poor self-esteem can easily be read as the result of years of being told that she's unintelligent and a troublemaker. Because her teachers—powerful authority figures in a young student's life—have focused entirely on Ally's behavioral issues and bad grades, this is all that Ally focuses on as well. Thanks to the focus on just the areas in which Ally does poorly, Ally never learns to value or be proud of the things she does well, like drawing. Despite the fact that she draws much of the time, Ally doesn't think of herself as being an artist and instead sees her talent for art as just another facet of her failure to be successful at school (since she often draws to escape classwork she can't complete). After years of being told she's dumb, Ally comes to believe that this is true—and hearing this is inescapable, as Ally's classmates, especially the bully Shay, never miss opportunities to remind Ally that she's the worst student in class. This shows the power of other people's narratives to shape a person's self-image, and the danger of being exposed to toxic environments and people who look for others' weaknesses before acknowledging a person's strengths.

Mr. Daniels's arrival in Ally's classroom represents a major interruption to the feedback loop that contributes to Ally's low self-esteem. He calls all of his students "fantasticos," shuts down bullying and Shay's rude comments whenever he can, and also celebrates parts of students' identities that they didn't realize were worth celebrating, like Ally's artistic leanings, Albert's logical nature, and Oliver's ability to come up with all sorts of ideas.

As he does this, Mr. Daniels also encourages his students to be themselves. Though Ally, Keisha, and Albert discuss at several points that they don't know who they are at this point in their lives, Mr. Daniels implies through his words and actions that his students are in the middle of a perfectly normal process of discovery —and, radically for outcasts like Ally and Albert, that his students have the power to choose how to define themselves. This becomes especially powerful for Ally near the end of the school year, when Mr. Daniels conducts a history lesson in which he teaches about various celebrities and historical figures including Albert Einstein, George Washington, Whoopi Goldberg, and John F. Kennedy—all of whom are either officially identified as having or are believed to have had dyslexia. By offering these examples of famous, powerful people who changed the world in spite of or because of the same thing that keeps Ally from thinking positively about herself, Ally is able to make the final shift to thinking of her dyslexia as a superpower that makes her wonderfully different, rather than as a marker of stupidity and failure.

Once Ally is able to make this shift to becoming more confident and proud of what she can do well, she also finds that it's easier to ignore the negative things that others say about her. With this, Fish in a Tree brings the ideas of identity as a personal project and identity as a group effort together: by changing the stories that Ally hears, Mr. Daniels is able to teach Ally that who she is isn't a bad thing—and in turn, empowers her to choose carefully who to listen to when others speak about her, and to value her own voice over the negative voices of others.