Literary complicity exists when an author demands that the reader take an active role in interpreting a text. Frequently the author sets forth various positions or explanations and asks the reader to decide between them. The author may or may not have a primary position or explanation for the questions he poses--but he must present or suggest at least two possible explanations or "sides" of an issue. Further, the explanation or "key" to the literary work must be a primary concern in the text.
Identity has been a more obsessive concern in American literature than in English literature. In American Society, one creates oneself. Possibilities for the resultant self are endless--and confusing.
Complicity is the literary objective correlative of the choices that every American faces as he or she gradually chooses his/her own identity.
question the fundamentals of identity or of reality obsessively
Complice:
1. (general) One associated in any affair with another, the latter being regarded as the principal; an associate, confederate, comrade.
2. (specific) An associate in crime, a confederate with the principal offender (From the frequent early use of the word in connexion with crime, the sense became predominant by 1600, and was the only one recognised by Johnson in 1755)
1860, Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White, II, ii, 181. "English society is as often the accomplice as it is the enemy of crime." 1853, H. Rogers, ECl. Fith 158: "To permit any evils which we can prevent is in like manner to be accomplices in the crime."