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?