Gunnar's increasing self awareness and mounting sense of frustration in Paul Beatty's The White Boy Shuffle led me to recall the crucial moment of near-enlightenment for Bigger in Native Son. The moment comes when he says to Max, "I didn't want to kill...But what I killed for, I am! It must've been pretty deep in me to make me kill! I must have felt it awful hard to murder...What I killed for must've been good!" With this heightened sense of purpose and meaning in his life, he is then readier to die.
Through his experiences at Boston University, Gunnar seems to be feeling with intensified ferocity the same indescribable "red-hot iron" Bigger attempts to articulate as he begins to contemplate his "raison d'etre," combined with the "crazy" in Invisible Man's narrator in his increased awareness of ridiculous circumstance and the impossibility of ever cutting the strings and successfully separating himself from the identities projected upon him.
Bigger's near-enlightenment and self discovery has always been particularly difficult for me to grasp because on one hand, I can see some truth in his epiphany but on the other, I am not completely convinced that the reason behind one's strongest feeling encompasses all of one's true identity although it is a definite factor. Consequently, Gunnar's speech at the rally that spoke of sincerity coming from a readiness to die and the reactions to it has manifested for me a lot of how Bigger's conclusion can be viewed as insufficient in the wrong light but valuable in another.
For me, one of the difficult aspects of Bigger's conclusion is how he is still unable to fully articulate what he killed for. What I find to be a problematic interpretation then, is the idea that the killing -- or in The White Boy Shuffle, the dying -- was or is necessary proof for the existence of the reason for killing or dying; the feeling that makes up identity. To incorrectly take this to the extreme, is to be Peyote Chandler at 12 years old, sticking her head in the oven in order to make the ultimate statement and validation of her grief in losing her boyfriend. In this scenario, she discovered little about herself in this readiness to die; it was not a readiness to die, like Gunnar's then, that pushed her to reflect upon the reason but conversely, the misguided belief that the feeling needed to be validated by death. Beatty points out this misguided interpretation and the persistent desire of society to be told what reality is, what steps to follow to achieve truth, in his absurd depiction of a multitude of black people across the United States and Dexter's suicides; people who believed that death would give the purpose to life.
I wonder then, to what extent, Bigger's self discovery is self-justification and a deluded method of coping and to what extent it is enlightenment. Did he believe that the killing was what gave his life purpose or the acts that allowed him to better articulate and focus on the "feeling" in reflection, in their impulsiveness, therefore increasing his self awareness? The image Gunnar refers to, of Osamu Dazai wandering around Japan, attempting to summon the courage to drown himself in the Tamagawa River particularly struck me, resonating with the restlessness and "ambivalence" of Bigger, the narrator, and Gunnar. Ending your life is supposedly the opposite of ending the life of another but they can both suggest the greatest manifestation of an unfulfilled desire. However, this desire does not need the manifestation to exist which is why a readiness to die that hopes for a resolution or translates some truth somewhat understands the readiness -- the "It" one is dying for -- just as Bigger is able to somewhat understand and become more aware of his readiness to kill.
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