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.
Nice post. Beatty's use of humor while telling a much darker story really adds to the shock when something bad happens.
ReplyDeleteNice comparison to the other novels that started with violence, I hadn't;t thought of that. Also, that violence is throughout the White Boy Shuffle, but it's masked with humor so you don't see it as easily. Nice post!
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, the humor seems to mask a lot of the darker elements in the novel. I would mention that even when the suicide talks come up in the book, it still doesn't keep Beatty from cracking jokes all over the place. Maybe it has something to do with the general hopelessness at the end of the book, and Gunnar/others trying to cope with it?
ReplyDeleteyeah I'm with you. I think that opening with suicide sets a subconscious ominous undertone for the rest of the novel, but you're still taken aback by the ending.
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