White Boy Shuffle: Gunnar's Identities

Gunnar struggles with his identity throughout the novel. It does not that other people keep putting identities on him as well. The first identity put upon him is "the funny cool black guy" at his school in Santa Monica. Gunnar seemed content with this identity because it fit who he felt he was. This all got turned around when his mom decided to move to Hillside, and inner-city community in the middle of Los Angeles. At first, he gets labeled as a geeky kid who acts white. Soon, he adopts a nerd identity, but quickly leaves that behind to be a basketball legend. While he is a basketball legend, he is also well-known for his poetry across the country. He now has two relatively famous identities. When he goes to the high school in the valley, the basketball identity overshadows the poetry one. When he takes the SAT, he gets a new identity from the perspective of his counselor and colleges. He is now also a good student. When Gunnar gets to college, the poet identity prevails over the others and that is now the main way he is known on campus.

Does Gunnar see himself the same way that others see him? I don't think so. He is very apathetic about basketball and the fame that comes with it, so there is no doubt that Gunnar would be happy to shed the basketball identity. I fact, on his last day on the high school basketball team senior year, he makes fun of the identity by dressing up in minstrel gear. When it comes to poetry, I think Gunnar enjoys writing poems, but is not especially excited to be known across the country. He's not going to do anything about it, but it is not his choice to have his poems read nationwide to begin with. He doesn't publish his book to share his poetry, but so that he doesn't have to go to college anymore. It is hard to know how he sees himself, but I don't think it is defined by basketball, poetry, or any one of the things in his life that other people use to define him. We never really get to understand his self-identity, even in the prologue or epilogue. We do see, however, that he considers himself, to some extent, the leader of a people. I think that Beatty uses Gunnar's series or outside identities to enforce the idea that Gunnar's life is a show.

Comparison: Is Hurston a Pale Poet?

In some of his writing, Richard Wright critiques Zora Neale Hurston for seeming to be a minstrel figure, playing to the white people's desired entertainment. He also is criticizing Hurston for not speaking about real social issues. In doing this, is Wright calling Hurston a "pale poet?" I think he is calling Hurston a "pale poet" because he is saying that she doesn't talk about real issues, but only pristine and courtly things, like the white romantic writers. Is Hurston really a pale poet though? Maybe.

One major difference between Native Son and Their Eyes Were Watching God is that Richard Wright wrote Native Son intending it as a protest novel, but Zora Neale Hurston did not write Their Eyes Were Watching God as a protest novel, rather as a depiction of what she found in her anthropological studies and as a way to expose the Everglades culture and Eatonville culture to the rest of society. Wright criticizes Hurston for not writing a good protest novel. That's true, because she didn't write a protest novel. I think that this part of Wrights argument is futile and invalid.

Part of the "pale poet" argument that Wright makes has to do with the fact that Hurston does not blatantly state and argue against an issue in society as a way of provoking change. However, Hurston does show issues with gender roles and institutionalized racism by including Jody and Mrs. Turner. This is just not the central point of the novel and it does not focus on the issues too much, because if it did, it wouldn't be quite as accurate a depiction of the culture. Jody's confinement of Janie to the lonely inside of the store critiques gender roles. Mrs. Turner is "colorstruck" and can't look past the shade of a person's skin tone to see their real personality. These characters are the social critiques that Wright didn't seem to acknowledge in Hurston's writing.

I think that Hurston is not a pale poet, because she depicts both the joys and the hardships of the culture she is describing in Their Eyes Were Watching God. She is in fact making a statement about the reality of American society in the south, but that is not her purpose. Hurston's purpose is to separate the culture she studied in her travels from minstrelsy in a novel, not connect them.