The performing self

Goffman says we are always staging ourselves for an audience. What I find unbearable about this isn't that it's true, it's that he seems fine with it, like it's just a neutral feature of being social. H

Hesse isn't fine with it. Sinclair spends the whole first chapter suffocating under a self he built for other people, and the book treats that as a crisis, not an adaptation. I think Goffman describes the condition and Hesse describes the cost. The question neither of them quite answers: is there a self behind the performance, or does the performance go all the way down?