Much of Sasuke’s backstory is glossed over in the Naruto series, as we only catch snippets of his past, glimpses of Sasuke’s life in important tidbits, brief shards of highlighted moments. Sasuke’s loyalty and devotion to his clan is a central aspect of his character, yet his relationship to his clan stands as one of the most heavily implicit of Sasuke’s bonds, seeing as how the series rarely explores Sasuke’s childhood much except for in regards to his three family members. Much of Sasuke’s motivation throughout the series stems from his love for his clanmates, yet his love for his clan can be difficult to understand when we are given so little screentime exploring Sasuke’s clanmates.

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Sasuke’s fierce devotion to his clan brings up many questions about his life before the Uchiha massacre. Did he have friends in his clan? Did he have living relatives apart from Mikoto, Fugaku, and Itachi? What was life as son of clan leader like? How did that affect the clan’s perception of him? What pressures and responsibilities did Sasuke feel as the son of the clan’s leader? How many members of his clan did he personally know? What were his neighbors like? Did he play with other Uchiha children? How close was he to other Uchiha clan members outside of his immediate family? Myriads of questions spring to mind in regards to Sasuke’s life with his clanmates. When one considers Sasuke’s past, there is practically more we don’t know about his backstory than things we do know, as much of Sasuke’s past is unexplored by omission, leaving gaps in his story that make it difficult to piece together what his life was like prior to when Part I begins. Because so much about the average, daily lives of the Uchiha clan is implied rather than shown and because the clan members are little explored outside of the main ones, it leaves a lot of the nature of Sasuke’s relationships to his clanmates up to conjecture and head-canon rather than having concrete statements or scenes illustrating who Sasuke knew and hung out with during his childhood. Even so, details appear throughout the series and shed light on his bonds with his clanmates, allowing us to piece together the fragments and gain a vague picture of what connections Sasuke had to his clanmates, as well as what being an Uchiha meant to Sasuke.

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Originally I expected this book to be several chapters shorter, focused only on Sasuke’s relationships to Shisui, Teyaki, Uruchi, & Izumi as well as a chapter summarizing Sasuke’s feelings for his clan as a whole. However, writing this book led me to mull over the moments when Sasuke mentioned his clan or when his clan’s influence drove Sasuke to a certain reaction or course of action. Needless to say, this book ended up being longer than I’d intended. I hadn’t anticipated my observations to meander the way they did, so this book may not be the most direct analysis and wanders here and there a bit at parts. This work is a collection of observations about Sasuke’s psyche in regards to his connection to his clan and musings on Sasuke’s relationship to the Uchiha clan, with a few chapters focusing on his relationships with specific members of his clan that, while worthy of note, only needed a single chapter. So this book became an analysis that captures the foundational undercurrents of Sasuke’s mind, analyzing the flow of his thought processes. Because Sasuke’s identity as Uchiha was such an important aspect of Sasuke’s character, it’s important to understand how Sasuke’s relationship to his clan impacted his psyche and the way he viewed himself, as well as how his attachment to his clan affected his choices and his character.

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There isn’t enough of Sasuke’s thoughts on his clan in Boruto for me to bother discussing, so I’m not going to delve into Boruto in this analysis. Sasuke mentions his clan so little in Boruto that it’s hard to get a feel for his thoughts and feelings on his clan in any nuanced or meaningful way. I assume Sasuke’s feelings on the Uchiha as an adult are the same as in Book of Sunrise when he was a young adult – he still has a collectivist attachment to his clan and treasures his clan deeply, although he has found other people to live for and focus on at the moment, those being Naruto, Sakura, and Sarada.

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Hopefully this book will shed light on Sasuke’s childhood, his attachment to his clanmates, and why the Uchiha massacre was an event that shattered Sasuke’s psyche and was an emotional blow he could never quite fully recover from, even up to adulthood. At the very least, I hope this work might be cause for Naruto fans to ponder their own thoughts and draw their own conclusions of what Sasuke’s relationships to his fellow Uchiha were.

 

-Indra Nakari