I'll just give a brief introduction. I was recently, at the end of last semester, asked to observe Octavio Paz's style of writing and how he went about defining and understanding what it meant to be Mexican and was then given the seemingly incomprehensible assignment of doing the same for America. However the task was harder than it would have seemed, as what I had were memories, thoughts, meandering in the broken streaming pondering of the mind and how the mind works, struggling to grasp, to isolate, to grab hold of that experience that feeling of Americanness. Of course it is hard to find, in some sense it doesn't exist in that there is nothing taught that makes you American, no real life Experience that suddenly leads you too it, it is, as I stated, something that I must have merely breathed in with the air.
The following short essay is not meant to put down American, but merely to try and grasp what it is that makes it so for me, and everyone else's personal experience and ideas on this will likely differ. Mine is not meant to be critical or laudatory, but merely to understand.