White Boy Shuffle Reflection

The vibe I got from Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle was so much different than the previous book I’ve read in this class. When I first started it, the epilogue made me feel like the book is going to get dark really quickly. For all the other novels we’ve read, traumatic events are revealed or happen to the main character within the first few chapters. Beloved death was referred to from the very beginning of Beloved, the Battle Royale scene was the first chapter in Invisible Man, and Native Son opens with Bigger violently killing a rat. But with The White Boy Shuffle, suicide is mentioned in the prologue and then left out for a large chunk of the novel. Full chapters go on without any hint of suicide in the foreseeable future. And so I sort of forgot about suicide while I was reading—just enjoying the humor and personality of Gunnar--until it started become more apparent after the LA Riots.

            That’s something that I felt Beatty was really good at: catching his reader by surprise. He did it with Gunnar’s entire life (I mean, just think about the family history, and his father, and the fact that he was a genius basketball player/gang-ish member and married at 18.) The writing style of Beatty was key to this. Without humor, the plot can be much more predictable. But humor throws everything off and catches the reader by surprise. In our other novels, humor was limited and scarce, but Beatty thrived on it, and that’s what made his novel 10 times more haunting. He was able to catch me off guard by framing his story in such a lighthearted tone and then ending it in such a way that I had to go back and re-think the narrative of Gunnar’s life and why I was laughing.

Gunnar's Passiveness

From what I’ve read so far in the book, Gunnar seems to be a generally “woke” (and hilarious) narrator, which sets him apart from the narrator in Invisible Man. However, Gunnar is quite passive when it comes to his personal path in life. His friends and family choose his life decisions for him, or at least, are the biggest component in making those decisions. One example is basketball. Basketball makes Gunnar famous across America and helps him get a full-ride scholarship to Boston University, but Gunner isn’t personally passionate about it or even cares. During the high school game, Gunner gets annoyed by how important it is to his peers that make the shot and it is clear from the emails he sends to his friends and family over the summer that he really doesn’t like basketball. Then why does he do it? It started off being because of Scoby. Scoby makes Gunnar play basketball the first time Gunnar goes out with him and his friends. When Gunnar dunks, his new friends adore him and tell everyone about it and so Gunnar just runs with it. But it was never something that genuinely interested Gunnar.

            Another big life decision for Gunnar that he doesn’t make is who he marries. Gunnar expresses no interest in the woman that are around him, and so he never is in a relationship. When Psycho Loco literally mails Gunnar a Japanese bride (Yoshiko Katsu), Gunnar just goes ahead and marries her when a) they have just about nothing in common and b) they don’t know each other. Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but it looks to me like Gunnar is just letting other people and his surrounds just run his life and his choices and I wonder if that is the message that Beatty is trying to get across to the reader.

            Thoughts?

Mixed Feelings About Paul D

Let's talk about Paul D, shall we?

When Paul D first entered the novel, I was naturally inclined to like him because he seemed to be helping Sethe in getting out of the house more and was giving her some attention. He is also a character that has suffered through slavery and all the horrors that go along with that and so I feel like he deserves sympathy as well as respect and admiration (especially considering his time as a prisoner and his escape.)

At the same time, Paul D irritates me in the manner that he treats Sethe and her children. He doesn't have much care for Denver and Beloved as one of the first fights he has with Sethe is about Denver. He is also so overprotective of Sethe and selfish in the sense that he doesn't want Beloved to get close to her and he just wants Beloved to go away (even though she has the same, if not more, rights to be there in 124.) His want to have Sethe alone is demonstrated when he asks to have a baby with her. His whole plan is that having the baby will get at least Beloved to back off. 

And that brings me to a whole other issue: his affair with Beloved. I couldn't tell if it was a one time thing or if it was reoccurring but either way it was extremely disturbing to read the shed scene, especially after realizing that Beloved was killed in that very shed. That scene makes me so queasy about Paul D and I just can't read about him in the same way. So now I have very mixed feelings about Paul D. On one hand, I want to be thankful that he is there for Sethe for a period of time but on the other hand I sort of strongly dislike him because he is disloyal and just walks away after Sethe tells him how Beloved died. What do y'all think? Where do you stand on the matter of Paul D's character?

Chapter 19: Janie's Indpendence?

Personally, chapter 19 of “Their Eyes Were Watching God” was so hard for my brain to handle. The two main reasons for this was 1) the scene that ends with Janie shooting Tea Cake and 2) that all white-male jury that sides with Janie (?!!!). Janie loved Tea Cake so much that she had willing sacrificed much of her life to be with him (as opposed to being sort of forced to change, like with her first two husbands.) However, when she is confronted with her beloved trying to murder her, Janie is forced to choose between herself and Tea Cake. This is one of the few times in the book where Janie is having to make a decision without a man or a Grandma. Because of her love for her soon-to-be-dead-anyways rabies-infested husband, she chooses herself. The scene baffles me because Janie exercises her independence but at the same time, is still doing it for the love of her husband.

Then there is the all white, all male jury. I kept trying to think about why in the world Hurston would do that. To me, Hurston is trying to highlight race/gender, but it is not clear at all what she is trying to get at. Maybe Hurston did that because she wanted Janie to open up her thoughts and the story to an uninvolved audience (assuming none of the white men knew Tea Cake.) I am honestly so confused by the whole idea so if anybody would like to try to explain that, it would be great.  

Thoughts?

"Visible" Man

So I was casually looking up Henry Dumas because I wanted to find out how he or his work was influenced by his time stationed in Saudi Arabia. Unfortunately, I didn’t find anything about that (and I’m a bit skeptical if he was really affected by his time there since he would’ve been around other soldiers who share his language and culture and so it’s unlikely he would have spent much time out and about in Saudi Arabia absorbing complex Arabic poetry that Arabs themselves have trouble understanding.)

However, I did find something that would be of more interest to this class. After the death of Henry Dumas, Jeffery B. Leak wrote a biography on him titled Visible Man (that’s right, as opposed to “Invisible Man”.) The book focuses on Dumas and his art in the context of Black Art, Black Power, and the Civil Rights Movement. As discussed in class, Dumas was shot and killed by a policeman in his early thirties.

My opinion: I don’t think Visible Man is the best title to give Dumas’ biography unless given out of irony. Of course Dumas had a lot of influence and wrote very important works for African American literature, but I also feel his invisibility to be similar to the narrator’s. The biggest evidence of that to me is his death: an example of police brutality and a killing primarily based off of skin color. Dumas wasn’t visible to everyone, otherwise he wouldn’t have been killed. Maybe I’m being too skeptical though (?)  

Opinions?

Let There be Shade!

The narrator's shades that he buys to hide himself from Ras' people end up allowing him to see everything in a new light. But what I thought was very interesting was that Ellison made it so that the narrator was able to see more clearly when everything was darker. The narrator has been whitewashed throughout his entire life. Remember the beginning of the book? The narrator is literally used as a source of entertainment for a crowd of white men and he didn’t question it. But the shades help him see more clearly, even though the narrator explicitly says, “I could barely see; it was almost dark now, and the streets swarmed in a green vagueness.” By putting the shades on, the narrator sees a world that the Brotherhood (a white ruled organization) has not even noticed. People that the narrator would see every day, like those at the saloon, treat him completely different. His friends, strangers, officials, church-going Christians, women, nobody could recognize the narrator even though he is described as being an infamous speaker.

The darkness of the shades allows the narrator to explore and learn more about how he doesn’t know. He thinks he knows Harlem but he’s only seen it through the glass eye of Jack, a white male. When he sees it through the dark shades of Rinehart, the narrator is able to see more of Harlem and more of himself. He realizes what Bledsoe what trying to explain to him and how he’s been played over and over again. And he realizes all of this just but putting on another layer of black.

What do you guys think?

White or Black, These Men All the Same

Which men are all the same? To be specific: the superintendent, Mr. Norton, Dr. Bledsoe, Emerson Jr., the Doctor, and Brother Jack. Each man looks at the narrator and wants to "keep him running." They want to both mold him to somebody who can and will follow a path that leads to no ultimate success and that they deem best for themselves or the narrator. The superintendent, Bledsoe, and Emerson Jr. all hand the narrator papers that take him on to a new chapter in his life that doesn't really benefit the narrator at all (you could argue that Emerson's letter got the narrator a job, but Emerson was still doing it out of a want to defy his father and the job was awful in and of itself.) Mr. Norton tells the narrator that he is literally in charge of Norton’s fate and he wants the college to mold students like the narrator to follow through with Norton's fate, again not treating the narrator like an independent individual, but rather somebody who they can use to represent what they think a black man like the narrator should be. The doctor(s) from the factory are physically trying to rewire the narrator into what they want a black man to be. 
Brother Jack also fits in to this category of men who want to mold the narrator. He sees (much like the superintendent) a skill the narrator has to give speeches and he tries to exploit that. He sees the narrator as a tool to spread the Brotherhood's rhetoric and as a sort of "poster child" for the Brotherhood since he is a black man and the Brotherhood s mostly white. Similarly to the job the narrator took at the factory, he is only working for the Brotherhood because of financial reasons. Yes the narrator does not seem to fully agree with what the Brotherhood wants and he definitely is more skeptical than before his accident at the factory, but I would argue that the Brotherhood is still "keeping him running" because the narrator does nothing to undermine or defy their authority and control over him. All his skeptical-ness is in his head and he has a long ways to go before completely following the advice from his grandfather.

Speaking of the grandfather, do you guys think that he fits into the same category as the men above? I think an argument could be made that he does since he is sort of trying to mold his grandson into what he believes a black man should be. Thoughts?