Identity opens with a dialogue between two women about a show, Lost to Sight, which discusses people who have vanished. They converse specifically about a local family that appeared on a recent episode who had all disappeared without a trace. This idea of being lost to sight strikes Chantal; in our world of cameras, of constant surveillance in which our portraits, fingerprints, information - our identities - is retained on file, how could one disappear entirely?

The story revolves around Chantal, who works in advertising while not falling in line with the corporate ethos - accomplished by wearing two faces - and Jean-Marc, who figures he is on the fringes of society, one step away from living life as a tramp (he describes a homeless man as his double). Chantal has left her ex-husband, a man of diminutive stature she called her “little mousie,” to be with Jean-Marc, a man who sought no information of her past life, wishing to remain ignorant of her identity as it excludes him.

When Chantal wanders the beach, surrounded by fathers, or, as she calls them, “daddies”; fathers without a father’s authority, men who go to the beach to play with their children, she laments that these daddies are so invested in their kites and beach-time activities that they do not notice her. She imagines herself approaching a father with two children strapped to his body and one at his side while flying a kite, whispering lewd things in his ear. “Leave me alone, I’m busy,” he would hiss.

“Men don’t turn to look at me anymore,” she complains to Jean-Marc, who wishes to say, What about me? Me who goes searching for you for kilometers on the beach, me who shouts your name in tears and who could chase after you the length and breadth of the planet?

To soothe Chantal’s injury, her absence of identity to other men, he pens her anonymous letters, signed CDB which we later learn stands for Cyrano de Bergerac who underwent a similar endeavor for a woman. This plan could not be successful without the author experiencing jealousy over his lover’s concealment of the letters, harboring them, keeping them safe from detection — “And if the woman keeps those letters secret, it is because she wants today’s discretion to protect tomorrow’s adventure.”
Chantal puts on her red beads and her red shawl which her admirer is so fond of. The beads she only wears on special occasions, yet she dons them so easily for another man. When she passes the first man she suspects if the author, she blushes down to her chest after not having blushed for years, after having forgotten how to blush. Before she and Jean-Marc make love, she acts dismissive, making Jean-Marc give chase to her around their home, pursuing her as if she were new prey and, while they make love, she imagines a third party seated to the side, watching them.

The tension mounts when Chantal’s step-sister visits without notice. Her three young children are at play in Chantal’s bedroom and when she looks into her room she sees her brassieres, her underwear and - what else? - her letters scattered about the floor. She kicks her step-sister and her children out without ceremony. With the letters revealed, Chantal escalates the situation by announcing that she is leaving for London, where Jean-Marc, under the guise of CDB, has announced that he is departing to. She means to force him to stop her from traveling by admitting that he is the author of the letters, an admission he does not make. Following her departure, he catches a taxi and seeks to confront her at the Gare du Nord before she boards the train to London. Thinking it unwise not to call her bluff, he boards the London-bound train in the hopes that she would be aboard it as well. She is found in the first-class compartment along with her colleagues who are, by some miracle, attending a business trip to London.

Jean-Marc, having finally located her, is wounded to see that Chantal is in high spirits and is animated in a way she has not been with him. After arriving in London and departing the train, Jean-Marc means to pursue her, an impossibility after being apprehended by an officer for attempting to push through a crowd in the midst of a spectacle involving children in helmets being filmed. Before he loses sight of her, he notices Chantal in a phone booth, realizing later that she was likely telephoning a former lover he had nicknamed Britannicus, who, after his acquaintance with Chantal, she finds out is a renowned orgiast. He then loses sight of her before the crowd clears.

With only enough money for a return trip, Jean-Marc awaits Chantal’s return at the train platform. Across the street is a building in which, by some stroke of unexplained intuition, Jean-Marc suspect Chantal is in, engaging in an orgy. Chantal, stripped of her clothes, seeks to escape the orgy and find her way to the landing to retrieve her clothes and make her exit, but the complex is a labyrinth, with the rooms leading to dead-ends and the doors in the process of being nailed shut. Chantal means to escape through an open window, the same one Jean-Marc stands outside of and looking into through the upraised curtain. Jean-Marc shouts her name and she wakes up from a dream.

Yes, it was a dream, but how much of Identity has been dreamed? What happenings can the reader assert as fact without any doubt? Perhaps none, for Identity is merely fiction and, as fiction, we can be sure that nothing has truly transpired. Kundera treats the finale of the book with the same lightness of style that we have become accustomed to in nearly all of his fictional works, which are often as farcical and fantastic as they are earnest. Kundera believes he is an author without a message. As such, he means to jerk us awake from our reading of Identity, from the dream wherein we imagine that there is a moral or message to be freed from the book. We are thus awakened from the dream of fiction into reality, where everything was as it was before our beginning the book.