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Second Period

Seventh Period

A Walking, Talking, Ranting Contradiction

No one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. As the novel’s paradoxical title indicates, he embodies contradictions—an “angry black white boy” who is capable of astounding arrogance and a hyperbolic sense of his own importance, relentless in his criticism of white people and the privileges they blithely enjoy, but just as relentless in his self-scrutiny, which lies at the heart of his critique: “I’m here to tell the white man in the mirror the truth to his face.” When we’re annoyed with Macon, it’s usually because he seems to exempt himself from the vast swath of “whiteness” that is the target of his attacks: he aspires to “transcendent status,” the one rare white person who might fully escape his birthright as a privileged American and commit himself to the radical struggle for racial justice. Readers may want to ask, with Nique, “What’s up with all this ‘white people’ shit? You like an undercover brother or something?” (49).

Macon is capable of astonishing chutzpah, as when he attends a meeting of the Black Student Union, in the recently rechristened Malcolm X lounge, the only white person in the room (needless to say), and immediately starts challenging their suggestions for a guest speaker: “He was blacker than each and every one of these bourgeois motherfuckers” (123). He models himself after Malcolm X—a pretty high standard in terms of integrity and commitment to the cause. He smugly dismisses the 1960s feminist militant Angela Davis as “irrelevant,” the blaxploitation icon Pam Grier as “sagging,” the politically militant rapper Chuck D of Public Enemy as “finished,” and Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison as “Oprahfied.” Most contemporary black icons don’t meet his standards. He’s also quick to distinguish himself from other white boys who are into hip-hop (don’t even mention the Beastie Boys to him), other white writers who aspired to take part in black culture (“corny greyboy Jack Kerouac and his one-sided love affair with jazz” [26]), and other white revolutionaries (even throwing shade on John Brown—who led a raid on a federal armory in an effort to inspire a widespread slave uprising across the South and was executed for his efforts, a couple years before the federal government did the same thing). Who does this guy think he is?

The novel opens in Macon’s first-person voice, in a monologue that seems to be set at the end of his story, on a “Birmingham bus,” “broadcasting live and direct from the getaway ride as the scene of the crime fades away” (1). We are confronted with Macon’s beguiling tangle of contradictions from the very start as he tries to establish himself as “one good white person” when he laments that no news outlet ever called him “the white Bigger Thomas” (2)—readers of Richard Wright’s 1940 protest novel Native Son will laugh incredulously at such an audacious and nonsensical statement.

But by chapter 1, a third-person omniscient narrator has taken over. This narrator is sometimes closely aligned with Macon’s perspective, representing his interior thoughts and memories, and relentlessly cataloging his acute self-consciousness, the insecure, nervously sweating, self-doubting kid underneath this bold and cocky exterior. The scene in chapter 2 of book 1, when Macon meets Andre for the first time, is remarkable as a portrayal of painful awkwardness and racially inflected self-consciousness. We learn that Macon has been anticipating this moment all summer—not only did he request a black roommate, he’s requested Andre Walker specifically because he’s a descendant of Fleet Walker, the last African American baseball player to play in the major leagues before segregation in 1889. Macon is aware that his scheme will sound crazy to Andre, and he’s right. But even beyond his revelation of their historical connection, which wigs Andre out (“Wow. What am I supposed to do with that?” [29]), there’s a relentless self-consciousness to their interaction throughout. Macon is so proud of his purported degree of comfort around black people, his deep knowledge of hip-hop culture and black history, that he’s sharply attuned to the racial subtext of every single turn in the conversation. Even when he leans back on his bed, a seemingly innocuous and even commonplace posture for a dorm-mate to assume while shooting the breeze, he scrutinizes himself for how such a posture might be interpreted by Andre: “He threw a leg over his half-unpacked suitcase and leaned back, then wondered if the posture was too comfortable too quick, a typical cavalier-whiteboy-lounging-cuz-the-world-is-my-domain move” (32). This self-consciousness is a big part of Macon’s point: he wants to shake white people out of their complacent stupor, to get them to recognize all the small ways that privilege underwrites their lives, how they simply occupy space with a sense of entitlement. We should all be stopping to think before we throw our legs casually over the half-unpacked suitcase, so to speak. Every movement of his body and every word he says in this first interaction with Andre is potentially charged with meaning. Macon wants to make a good first impression, and he knows that he’ll come across as something of an enigma to Andre (which he does).

It’s important, I think, that Mansbach gives us such thorough access to Macon’s self-doubting interior monologue in this scene, as it’s a vital counterweight to his verbal bombast elsewhere. We have a would-be “race traitor” who thinks of himself as more radical than John Brown and on par with Malcolm X in terms of black militant street cred who is also very much putting on a front, trying desperately to make his behavior and words display his commitments—renouncing his whiteness doesn’t mean tinting his skin; it means presenting a certain face (and voice) to the world, advertising his abdication of white privilege with every word and gesture. He’s constantly worried that he’ll be revealed as just another poseur or wannabe, another in a long line of blackface-minstrel appropriations of blackness, and Andre’s acceptance of him and his ideological commitments is vital to his sense of his own legitimacy. It must be exhausting to be Macon.

But this scene would read quite differently if we only had Macon’s point of view. We would see the would-be white-antiracist superhero as he sees himself, and this would reveal a profound degree of self-consciousness and self-doubt under his bold façade. But Andre would remain an enigma, seen only through Macon’s eager-to-please eyes: a symbolic black roommate against which he can gauge how “down” he is. But Mansbach’s narrator has access to Andre’s point of view as well, and throughout this dialogic scene we see him reacting to Macon and his performance, and that reaction is full of skepticism. Andre emerges as a three-dimensional and complex character with his own complicated relationship to whiteness. As an alumnus of a prestigious, predominantly white prep school in Los Angeles, Andre has some context for Macon’s sales pitch: “Andre didn’t feel like listening to his roommate relieve himself [of white guilt]. He’d already served his time in prep school as a cardboard self-affirmation cutout. . . . A stoic, amiable receptacle into which fake-empathetic whiteboys dumped their views, a priest who heard confessions and smoked joints with the sinners to absolve them” (31). Andre is fully alert to the ways Macon seems to be making a “token” out of him, treating their conversation as a “confession” for which he expects “absolution,” and he’s not having it. To a significant extent, his qualms are justified—Macon is quite literally aiming for some kind of “cosmic,” historical reconciliation between the descendants of Fleet Walker and Cap Anson, after all. But we do hear some grudging props from Andre as well: “Macon might be a lunatic, and his bloodlines were certainly polluted, but at least he was hip hop enough not to view black people as an alien species” (34).

We get Nique’s perspective, too, and in the scene in chapter 3, in Nique’s dorm room, Macon’s interior monologue is outnumbered by the perspectives of the African American men he’s so eager to impress. Mansbach even ends the chapter with Nique and Andre alone in the room after Macon has left. Like Andre earlier, Nique gives Macon some grudging respect: “[A]t least your boy there’s trying. More than you can say for most of them” (54). We see that Macon’s performance hasn’t met with unqualified success, however, as Andre and Nique compare him to Harley Koon (a former classmate and the son of one of the cops who was acquitted for the beating of Rodney King, whose story is told in detail in the next chapter, background characterization for Andre and Nique and the personal significance of the LA Riots of 1992 that Macon is not privy to—we know more about their background than he does).

Even as they take on the role of managers for Macon’s “career” as a white antiracist activist and provocateur, booking him media appearances and managing his public image, Andre and Nique make it clear that the jury remains out. Andre says, “I’ve decided to believe in you until you give me reason not to” (149), and Nique is even more blunt: “Personally, I still think you’re full of shit, but hell, go ’head and keep proving me wrong” (163).

Angry Black White Boy is a much more interesting book, in my view, because it doesn’t offer a single, uncritical perspective on its would-be hero. It’s clear that Macon and Adam Mansbach have a lot in common: Mansbach himself is deeply literate in the history of hip-hop culture; he didn’t have to do research to put together his riffs on the commercialization of the genre in the 1990s, or why The Low-End Theory by A Tribe Called Quest is such a “good choice” as the warmup track to his poetry reading (162). The author knows his black history and black literature, and his book seems to aim to achieve something like what Macon himself wants to achieve—to get white readers to look critically at themselves and their own privilege, and to challenge them to live in such a way that not only doesn’t take advantage of white supremacy but actively seeks to undermine it. We can tell that the author endorses Macon’s ideas to a considerable extent, but he also presents a deeply flawed, self-contradicting, often delusional hero whose sincerity and commitment (and, indeed, sanity) is under question from the very start. There’s a remarkable moral courage in Macon’s willingness to scrutinize and try to transcend his own whiteness, and his arrogance is tempered by a genuine self-critical gaze. But it’s never clear to what extent we’re supposed to affirm and admire Macon, and as the story gets increasingly outlandish, it’s not always easy to tell where the author is in relation to his creation.

No one knows what to make of Macon Detornay. Least of all the author himself.

Macon's Hip-Hop Credentials

In the first chapter of the first part of Angry Black White Boy, we get a pretty detailed picture of Macon Detornay's cultural immersion in hip-hop and how this has led to a much deeper exploration of African American history and culture. He is proud of the depth and breadth of his hip-hop knowledge, as when he makes sure Andre (who is from L.A.) knows that Macon is "the only kid from the Bean [a.k.a. Boston] who was up on L.A. hip hop before Straight Outta Compton," namedropping KDAY tapes that he got "from [his] man's cousin." Andre acknowledges that "that's some O.G. shit," and seems duly impressed. Macon is eager to impress the reader with the depth of his knowledge of Five Percenter terminology and cosmology, as he reviews his notes "with idle pride" while piloting his cab through Manhattan. Indeed, he is correct in assuming that there aren't too many white boys out there who know this stuff as well as he does, and "he could scarcely remember a time when he hadn't known this shit." So how did he gain access to this privileged knowledge and alternative education?

Macon got into hip-hop during what is known as the "Golden Age," from about 1988 to about 1992, when it was still relatively rare for a white kid to listen, and even more rare for a white kid to listen as closely and deeply as Macon does, right before the genre crossed over into mainstream acceptance and, many critics would say, a watered-down and more commercialized style and content. The New York-based rappers who dominated this period--Brand Nubian, A Tribe Called Quest, X-Clan, Eric B. and Rakim, Big Daddy Kane, and others--all hail from the generation after Black Power, and many of them were raised with Five Percenter philosophy and youth programs in their communities, which is reflected in their work. The music and lyrics are explicitly Afrocentric, and the imagery explicitly alludes to Five Percent Nation and Nation of Islam iconography and specific locations in Harlem, where the movement began. References to "the Asiatic Black Man," "Gods," "Earths," "Knowledge of Self," and other Five Percenter terms abound. Rappers address issues like economic nationalism and self-reliance, Afrocentric pride, the whitewashing of Eurocentric history, and a host of related topics that undergird Macon's alternative education.

To get a quick sense of the historical progression between the Golden Age and the commercialized era in which the novel is set, which Macon despises, compare this video by Brand Nubian ("Wake Up," from the album All for One, 1990):

to this one, from 1998, featuring the Cash Money Millionaires and a tune aptly titled "Bling Bling":

In the Brand Nubian video, the locations and images are specific and significant--street corners and storefront mosques in Harlem, Five Percenter iconography, Afrocentric fashion (beads, Africa medallions, dashikis and kufis)--and the lyrics are all about raising the listener's spiritual and political consciousness (i.e. "wake up!"). By 1998, we see how fully the aesthetic of rap videos has been transformed by commercial viability and MTV: the Africa medallions have been supplanted by a gold-and-diamond-encrusted dollar sign, and the lyrics and imagery are an unabashed celebration of the trappings of wealth and luxury. Social and political consciousness is out, bling is in, and if Macon has a chip on his shoulder about the current state of hip-hop at the time the novel takes place, developments like these have a lot to do with it.

Jack as Utopian Social Critic

It’s a common trope of utopian literature to feature an outsider’s perspective to comment on our flawed civilization. The traveler from another planet, or some distant imaginary realm, or the future, will be led on a walking tour of earth’s poor houses, prisons, and mental institutions, and the outsider will comment repeatedly on how shocking, confusing, and unnecessary all these social ills truly are. “In our advanced civilization, you see, there is no sickness and no poverty. We’ve solved the problem of crime, and we have no jails. Why is it that people in your world go hungry, when there is more than enough food to go around?” The effect, of course, is to lead the reader to compare his or her familiar society with the radically unfamiliar (and, in many cases, depressingly implausible) idealized civilization the outsider represents.

Emma Donoghue uses Jack and his unique perspective to an analogous effect in Room (although I am emphatically not suggesting that she posits Ma and Jack’s experience in Room as some kind of Utopia). One of Jack’s earliest interactions with a medical professional, soon after his and Ma’s escape/rescue, entails the doctor telling Jack he’s “some kind of hero” and asking him, “How’re you liking the world so far?” (177). Jack is bewildered, of course, and remains silent on “the world so far.” He can only nod once the doctor loads the dice and prompts him with, “Pretty nice?” At this early point, not much is “nice” about being in the world for Jack. He does end up finding much about the world to be “pretty nice”—bacon, ice cream, Legos—but he also finds the world bewilderingly complex and often ambivalent. For Jack, we all exist in an increasingly vast realm he calls Outside, but from our perspective, he’s the outsider, and Donoghue uses Jack’s sharp, intelligent, perceptive narration repeatedly to shine a critical light on aspects of our world we take for granted, much like the Utopian novelist.

Noreen describes Jack as “like a visitor from another planet” (225), and while he corrects her (“We’re not visitors, Ma says we have to stay forever till we’re dead”), his observations about early twenty-first century American society often serve a kind of social-critical function, akin to the visitor from another planet in Utopian fiction. Jack returns repeatedly to the idea that he and Ma are not fundamentally the same as these other people he’s seeing everywhere, and he has trouble getting his head around the fact that Ma once was one of them. He accepts Dr. Clay’s insistence that he’s “one of us,” part of “humankind,” but Jack privately wonders, “maybe I’m a human but I’m a me-and-Ma as well. I don’t know a word for us two. Roomers?” (274). But Jack is really the only true “Roomer,” as Ma is not forming her impressions of our planet for the first time, the way Jack is. When he makes offhanded comments like, “Outsiders are not like us, they’ve got a million of things and different kinds of each thing, like all different chocolate bars and machines and shoes. Their things are all for different doing, like nailbrush and toothbrush and sweeping brush and toilet brush and clothes brush and yard brush and hairbrush” (264), this serves both as a representation of his genuine disorientation at the endless variety of things that occupy space in our world and an implicit comment on all the stuff we surround ourselves with. In contrast, Ma and Jack’s starkly reduced way of life in Room might seem ideally simplified.

Plenty of Jack’s observations, wherein he defamiliarizes our world in a way that allows us to see it fresh, are simply funny—like when he alludes to the book about “mutant turtles who say no to drugs” (224). Or he points out totally familiar habits of speech, often involving the weird ways adults relate to children, because he hasn’t heard these things thousands of times, as other kids have (like when he bangs his head on the faucet in the bath and Grandma says “Careful”: “Why do persons only say that after the hurt?” [283]—good question, Jack!). At times he offers a kind of social-critical commentary, but it seems like he must be repeating an explanation Grandma or Steppa or Ma has given him, as when he describes the lottery: “The little cards with numbers all over are called a lottery, idiots buy them hoping to get magicked into millionaires” (285). This passage begins as Jack making his own observations about the sheer amount of trash our profligate civilization generates—“There’s lots of every kind of thing in the world but it all costs money, even stuff to throw away, like the man in the line ahead of us in the convenience store buys a something in a box and rips the box and puts it in the trash right away”—but “idiots” is not a word Jack typically uses, and when he describes the lottery, we imagine him parroting something Grandma must have said (as kids will do).

But some of his comments veer closer to social commentary, especially when he’s making observations about parenting. Again, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything ideal about Jack and Ma’s arrangement (like the book-club member who compares their imprisonment to her “peaceful” week spent at a monastery in Scotland, easily one of the dumbest comments made in this book [280]). But compared to Bronwyn and her parents—who I’m sure are fine people, and Bronwyn is going to grow up to be a fine, if somewhat entitled and overindulged, young woman—Jack and Ma seem to be doing pretty well. Jack is struggling to adjust to Outside, naturally, but his disorientation at the mall has everything to do with the fact that he has never been to a mall before, has never even heard of one, and doesn’t even know how stores work. If Jack behaves “badly” in the scene where Paul and Deana take him to the mall, it’s because he has no idea what’s going on. Bronwyn’s behavior, we surmise, is par for the course. She is accustomed to throwing a tantrum when she doesn’t get her way, and her parents are all too ready to indulge her. Paul and Deana’s take on parenting is very familiar to me as a contemporary American parent—and far be it from any of us to judge a fellow parent’s efforts too harshly. But dismissing a drum as a gift for a child as a “concussion hazard” seems like an especially ludicrous example of the modern-day obsession with helmets and safety seats and protecting children from every possible risk that might befall them. I’m not saying Bronwyn is turning into a little monster (though you’re certainly free to draw that conclusion yourself), but it’s clearly not a case of Paul and Deana’s parenting looking obviously so much better than Ma’s.

Some of Jack’s observations sound almost too pat, too perceptive and pointed and critically astute for even an exceptionally verbal five-year-old. “In the world I notice persons are nearly always stressed and have no time. [Uni students: Holla!] Even Grandma often says that, but she and Steppa don’t have jobs, so I don’t know how persons with jobs do the jobs and all the living as well. In Room me and Ma had time for everything” (286). Paul and Deana, of course, are balancing child-rearing with jobs (so Bronwyn gets to go to a high-end daycare facility to study sign language and hip-hop!), and this maybe has something to do with their Starbucks-fueled state of perpetual anxiety at the mall. But this passage also calls to mind the Utopian-fiction dynamic I described above: “You earthlings seem to always be in a hurry, but you never truly allow yourselves to be at the place you are.” Jack seems right, of course, and the reader is intended to glimpse something about the way we all live these days—to see contemporary culture mirrored back to us through the eyes of an innocent.

In the next paragraph, Jack nails a scenario that I certainly recognize as a parent: “Also everywhere I’m looking at kids, adults mostly don’t seem to like them, not even the parents do. They call the kids gorgeous and so cute, they make the kids do the thing all over again so they can take a photo, but they don’t want to actually play with them, they’d rather drink coffee talking to other adults. Sometimes there’s a small kid crying and the Ma of it doesn’t even hear” (287). We might update this playground scenario a year or two and describe the parents filming the kids’ reenactment of the “cute” thing, and then ignoring the kid while posting the footage to Facebook on their phone. I find this passage extremely sad—which is saying something in such a sad novel. It’s the impression that the parents “mostly don’t seem to like” their kids, even as they photograph them and share their “accomplishments.” Jack’s mother has no photos of his early years, but she doesn’t see this as “terrible” the way her mother does: “I don’t forget a day of it” (299). But Jack has no doubt in his mind that Ma “likes” him (in addition to loving him—not necessarily the same thing). It’s partly a result of their perverse living arrangements that creates this closeness, and again, Donoghue is not endorsing the situation that led to this special closeness. But as with the Utopian outsider commenting on the ways of our world, we might feel indicted in this visitor from another planet’s description of what we look like when we’re supposed to be playing with our kids.

“The Limits of Jack’s World”

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein summed up his conclusions about the relationship between language and the world in an oft-cited aphorism: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” The implications of this statement are profound: Wittgenstein is not quite saying that “all we have is language,” that there “is no objective reality” apart from language, but he does insist that we have no meaningful experience of the world without the language in which to conceive and express that experience. Our reality is shaped by our language, and not the other way around. “Objective reality” is not something we have unmediated access to, and so to that extent it does not meaningfully exist. Our picture of reality is entirely determined—and limited—by our capacity to say (or think) something coherent about and within it. “The world,” in this formulation, is not a material thing or place “out there” but rather a reflection and projection of our language itself. Elsewhere in the same volume, Wittgenstein observes, “The world is everything that is the case”—when we say “the world,” we basically mean “everything it makes sense to say.”

Learning a language means learning a world. And watching a child learn language is a powerful illustration of this concept in practice—you can see as they file new information, new words and concepts, into their already existing picture of the world. A new word or concept needs to fit somehow, and that “somehow” is grammatical. When I learn that the earth revolves around the sun, a picture of the universe and my place within it takes hold. If I were living before Copernicus, I would have inherited a different picture of the cosmos, and different sentences would make sense to me: my language would be in many ways incompatible with the language I now speak. A whole bunch of statements that would be true and reasonable in my language would make me sound ignorant, superstitious, or even blasphemous in a pre-Copernican context. I haven’t gone out and independently investigated and confirmed the orbit of the earth around the sun; it simply makes grammatical sense within my inherited language to talk this way. Statements about the earth’s movements are “held in place” by the larger linguistic context within which these statements make sense. This is true for everything we know. Our minds are circumscribed to a profound degree by our language.

In Room, by creating a narrative voice for Jack and engaging us intimately with his point of view as he tries to make sense of his profoundly circumscribed world, Donoghue illustrates Wittgenstein’s insights into the nature of language and our perception and experience of reality. We surmise, from the earliest pages, that Jack’s strange way of speaking is an accurate reflection of the reality he is forced to inhabit. He doesn’t feel constrained by the narrow dimensions of Room because he doesn’t know anything else. Jack’s “Room” seems to require only a limited number of words—the objects he needs nouns for are much more limited than for the average child. Jack has no need for generic nouns (a bed, a stove, a thermostat—or a mother, for that matter). So instead his world is populated by proper nouns: Bed, Door, Thermostat, Ma, and so on. These are literally one of a kind for him, as simply explaining that there are other doors of which “Door” is but one example would require explaining a lot to Jack, and Ma hasn’t been up to the task. He can see that doors are represented on TV, and that these resemble his Door in their form and operations, but this is explained by his dichotomy of “real” versus “TV”—TV represents another “planet,” another “world,” and his world has only one Door.

Ma is doing a heroic job of attempting to educate Jack, to exercise his mind and to teach him to read and do math and to learn things about science. And when it comes to language, the endeavor is full of dangerous territory. Jack’s world is profoundly, artificially, and criminally limited by Old Nick—but it’s crucial to grasp that Jack doesn’t experience it as such. His language makes his experience of Room incredibly rich; as we’ve talked about in class, it’s the setting for all these fun games Ma has invented, it’s populated by furniture and items that reflect his personal history (and he knows these stories by heart), and which Ma has “personified” by giving them proper names and genders. But the process of learning language, as anyone who has spent time around five-year-olds can attest, means asking a lot of questions, usually questions about what is real and what isn’t, and how one thing relates to another. Kids at this age have this insatiable hunger to learn about their world, and it’s no coincidence that this is the point at which their linguistic capacity has developed to the extent that they can frame such questions independently: a certain “bedrock” needs to be established before questions can even be formed. This is precisely the dilemma Ma faces as the novel opens—we can see that it’s becoming more and more difficult for her to maintain the bedrock fiction of “Room” as the entire universe in an 11x11 space. Jack’s questions, the new words and concepts he’s constantly learning, inevitably bump him up against the limits of his world. Jack’s language seems to be starting to outgrow his narrowly circumscribed world. Or, to stick with Wittgenstein’s formulation, as his language expands, his world inevitably does, too. And Ma will need to find a way to deal with this.

In the scenes before Ma decides to finally tell Jack her “story”—to “unlie” and strip him of his innocence—we repeatedly see how Jack’s questions press against the limits of what Ma is willing to tell him. She’s beginning to see that he cannot fully learn language without requiring her to explain a whole host of things that she has tried to keep him innocent of. When they measure Jack’s height on his fifth birthday, Ma remarks that it’s “normal” for him not to have grown more than an inch or two over the previous year (even as she’s clearly worried that it’s not normal, and that Jack’s development is stunted). Jack asks,  “What’s normal?” (13). He’s not asking what would have been a more typical amount of growth in a year, and he is not intending to make some broader point here about diversity (What is “normal,” after all? Aren’t we all unique individuals?); he simply does not know what the word “normal” means. Now how would you define it for Jack? Ma “chews her mouth” as she tries to find a way out of this corner. “It means OK. No hay problema.” Jack accepts this explanation and moves on, but we get a glimpse here of the minefield Ma must step through with even the most ordinary (or normal) words: not only is nothing about Jack’s growth and development “normal” (hay problema, in other words), but even trying to explain the concept of normativity, of Jack’s growth being more or less in line with how kids “typically” grow, would mean introducing him to the idea of a vast mass of other kids out there in the world, against whom he can be measured. His picture of the world would be altered. Ma can’t really define the word without sharing the picture of the world (that it is inhabited by billions of other people, and that we can generalize about the way they grow up) that it reflects. Jack’s world is limited by his language.

Later in the same scene, Jack says that he wants to “grow to a giant, but a nice one, up to here” (13), and Ma replies, “Sounds great,” but Jack notices that “Her face is gone flat, that means I said a wrong thing but I don’t know which” (14). What has Jack said “wrong” here? Well, he seems to believe that sometime around when he turns ten he’ll transform into a woman and have a baby boy growing in his belly—his mother has had to resort to more than the usual prevarications parents use to avoid answering tough questions about where babies come from. But it’s clear to us that Ma is hanging up on Jack’s simple claim about what he wants to be when he “grows [up]”—he hasn’t said anything wrong, and he is learning what phrases like “grow up” mean and that this will happen to him in some form. But for Ma this phrase calls up a world of trouble Jack is not privy to: what will he be when he “grows”? How much longer can this situation persist? Jack’s familiar and amiable fantasy about wanting to grow into a “giant” (kids say stuff like this all the time) evokes near panic in Ma, one that’s growing throughout these early pages, as she sees his language starting to expand beyond the walls of Room.

The game of Parrot, where Jack has to memorize a string of spoken words from the TV and repeat them verbatim, is a brilliant way to exercise his mind and develop his vocabulary—one more example of Ma’s heroic improvisational skills as a parent and educator. But this also provides an exceptionally risky venture, in terms of maintaining Jack’s limited language to reflect his limited world: Jack misconstrues “labor law” as “labeling” when he repeats a phrase from a guest on a political talk show. Ma corrects him, like a good teacher, and when he asks “What’s the difference?” she makes an effort to answer. “Labeling is stickers on tomatoes, say, and labor law—” (35). Where can she go from here? How would you define “labor law” in a way Jack could understand? Ma is visibly relieved when Jack lets her off the hook with his “huge yawn” (really, no five-year-old actually wants an adult to explain labor law). But again, we see how impossible the fiction of Room will be for Ma to maintain.

To her credit, Ma does not allow Jack’s world to stay limited by Room’s four walls. She could have done so, perhaps—banishing TV entirely, and sticking to the fiction that they are the only two “real” people in the universe, with Old Nick occupying a position somewhere between God and jailer (or Santa and Satan). But Ma wants to educate her son, to raise him to be a “human,” intelligent and self-aware and maybe even “normal,” and we’ll see, in “Dying,” how relieved she is to finally abandon the ruse and let him in on her secrets. She now has a co-conspirator, and Jack’s intelligence will be vital to their escape plan. Jack is devastated when his picture of his tiny world is suddenly blown wide open, but he’s better equipped to handle it because Ma has educated him so well. He has an exceptional vocabulary for a boy his age, and in his circumstances, and this means that he can accommodate all this new space, all these new people.

An Anti-Mentor for an Inverted Hero’s Journey

A Lesson Before Dying takes an unconventional approach to the paradigm of the hero’s journey. Grant’s “mission” does not entail a physical or geographical journey. He merely has to drive the thirteen miles from “the Quarters” to the town of Bayonne, repeatedly, where Jefferson sits in a jail cell awaiting his execution. Unlike the Bundrens, he has a nice, new 1946 Ford to get him there and back, and the travel itself is not rigorous. There are familiar elements from the hero’s journey paradigm, however—he must pass through a series of obstacles in order to take this trip, from “humiliating” himself by imploring Henri Pichot to talk the sheriff into authorizing these visits to having his pockets and Miss Emma’s picnic basket thoroughly searched each time he takes that long walk down the corridor, “as if I’m some kind of common criminal” (63)—and when we first encounter Jefferson in his cell he seems very far away indeed. Grant’s task—to make Jefferson “a man” before he meets his death—seems astronomically difficult, under the circumstances, and Grant’s been trying to “refuse the call” from the moment he’s first enlisted.

Rather than having to venture elsewhere in order to prove himself a hero, Grant must go inward, to the “belly of the beast” (or “innermost cave,” to borrow Campbell’s phrase) in the segregated South. Although Bayonne is all-too-familiar to Grant, as he grew up in the Quarters, there’s a potent sense of him entering hostile, enemy territory as he goes into Bayonne: the courthouse proudly sports the “national, state, and Confederate flags,” and Grant must walk past a “statue of a Confederate soldier” to enter the seat of state power over black lives (69). We see a jail populated by a hostile white sheriff and deputy, and black inmates who look like children. It’s a journey he really would rather not make, and we see Grant exhibit a range of quasi-adolescent efforts to avoid it, sulking, dragging his feet, and fantasizing about running away and leaving it all behind.

We see an ironic inversion of the hero’s journey paradigm here, where “staying home” and confronting the legacies of slavery and institutional racism by trying to “reach” this doomed young man requires more heroic courage than leaving home for the unknown. Grant had viewed college as his ticket out of the Quarters—a chance to “not be one of the others” (63), as his aunt puts it—and he seems disappointed in himself for coming back home afterward. The humiliation he endures in order to gain the “privilege” of visiting Jefferson “strips” him of “everything [Tante Lou] sent [him] to school for” (79). We know his parents have left Louisiana for California, following the route of many African Americans in the 1940s, who fled the South for West Coast war-industry jobs. Grant visited them once, but as Vivian says, “‘You couldn’t stay. You had to come back’” (30). It’s not only the Jefferson dilemma that generates this restlessness in Grant—he’s felt this way for a long time. Staying home and working as a teacher in this impoverished, sharecropper community is itself cast as an exercise in futility, with Grant perpetuating the cycle of racism and poverty.

In the annals of the “heroic teacher” paradigm, Grant would seem to be a poor candidate for the role: this isn’t Stand and Deliver or Dead Poets Society. Grant is a teacher with deep-seated doubts about whether teaching even matters, a member of his community who sees himself as an outsider, with his education a “burden” that makes him aware of the futility and the “cycle,” but unable to do anything to change it. He’d be better off without his education, perhaps—he could unload wood like these other guys, joke around, not worry so much. Nothing about Grant’s teaching seems “inspirational”—he thwacks students with a yardstick for writing sentences crooked or counting on their fingers, and he’s compelled to drill them like military enlistees in important skills like pledging allegiance to the flag that flies outside the jail where Jefferson will be executed, “hating himself” for doing it.

In a flashback in chapter 8, we learn that Grant didn’t come up with this whole “run away and be free of all this” motif on his own. He’s had a “mentor,” of sorts—and again, we see a familiar paradigm inverted. Grant’s own former teacher, Matthew Antoine, serves the structural role of the mentor in this journey—he’s the one who gives this young teacher his “knowledge,” his ostensible power to change lives through the magic of education, the eager student who would follow in the teacher’s footsteps. We’ve seen this montage in movies before: the fiery, bright student whose love for knowledge and justice is ignited by his own teacher, and we see the student rise to be a master himself, to heroically throw in with the good fight in the classroom. But Gaines pitches a curveball in the form of Grant’s mentor, and Antoine is maybe the least inspirational teacher-figure in American literature (with Addie Bundren running a close second, perhaps). He not only doesn’t inspire Grant, he vehemently warns Grant away from pursuing knowledge and education. Grant’s persistence doesn’t impress the old grouch, as in the familiar paradigm; it only irritates him further. “There was no love there for each other. There was not even respect. We were enemies if anything at all. He hated me, and I knew it” (64). But Grant has learned some lessons from Antoine, and we see his anti-mentor’s legacy popping up throughout the novel, every time Grant speaks of the futility of his enterprise and his desire to run away and leave it all behind. If the “journey” in this novel requires staying home and facing Jefferson and his fate head-on, in the belly of the beast, with Vivian serving as an ally to encourage Grant at every turn, Antoine represents the most prominent voice urging him to give up, to flee, to not even bother. He would seem to agree with Jefferson’s initial assessment: “It don’t matter.”

Despite calling himself a coward for not having run away himself—“‘I was afraid to run away. What am I? Look at me. Where else could I have felt superior to so many but here?’” (65)—Antoine generally depicts flight as a bid for freedom, a sensible ducking of any responsibility to try and contribute to the community in favor of going elsewhere, anywhere else. Grant’s teacher is not flattered by his student’s newfound desire to learn (“When he saw that I wanted to learn, he hated me even more than he did the others”) and depicts knowledge as a “burden” (63). He has no faith in the power of education to affect change: “When you see that those five and a half months you spend in that church each year are just a waste of time . . . [y]ou’ll see that it’ll take more than five and a half months to wipe away—peel—scrape away the blanket of ignorance that has been plastered and replastered over those brains in the past three hundred years. You’ll see” (64). We are confronted with the curious prospect of a mentor who begs his mentee to not follow his footsteps.

Early in the novel, before the “journey” of encounters with Jefferson in his cell begins, Gaines includes a powerful, authoritative voice that seems to undermine the value of the journey itself. If all education in this underfunded, one-room church is futile and doomed to fail from the start, how much more doomed is Grant’s attempt to “make Jefferson a man?” Grant is thoroughly pessimistic about his prospects from the beginning, telling his aunt and Miss Emma, “Jefferson is dead. It is only a matter of weeks, maybe a couple of months—but he’s already dead. The past twenty-one years, we’ve done all we could for Jefferson. He’s dead now. And I can’t raise the dead” (14). Antoine couldn’t have said it better himself. Perhaps he’d be proud of his mentee after all.

“Yourself and Your Doings outen His Eyes”

There’s something about Darl that just weirds people out. And I’m not just talking about readers. I’m talking about the other people in his life. Darl has a reputation as a strange young man whose spacey, dreamy demeanor unnerves others. The outside perspectives on the Bundren clan seem to agree in portraying Darl as “the queer one,” “the one folks talk about,” with his “eyes full of the land” all the time. Tull breaks it down this way: “I have said and I say again, that’s ever living thing the matter with Darl: he just thinks by himself too much” (71). Anse is painfully aware of his son’s reputation, as he winces at Darl laughing hysterically at Jewel following the wagon on his horse: “How many times I told him it’s doing such things as that that makes folks talk about him” (105).

Cora (not the most reliable judge) is the only one who seems inclined to defend Darl, distancing herself from the prevailing view of his “queerness” and framing him instead as a kind of religious visionary. She describes Darl approaching his mother’s deathbed before leaving on his three-dollar errand with Jewel as “the sweetest thing I ever saw,” something that restores her “faith in human nature”: “It was Darl, the one that folks say is queer, lazy, pottering about the place no better than Anse” (24). She agrees that Darl is not like the rest of the family (except maybe Anse, not too flattering a comparison), but she frames this as a good thing: “I always said Darl was different from those others. I always said he was the only one of them that had his mother’s nature, had any natural affection” (21). Of course, once we’ve read Addie’s chapter, we might question this appraisal of Addie as embodying “natural affection.” But Cora’s narrative introduces the idea that Darl’s strangeness can be interpreted variously, that his extreme sensitivity might actually be a kind of special intelligence. Yes, he may act “queer,” but look who he’s surrounded by! Cora goes so far as to call Darl “touched by God Himself and considered queer by us mortals” (168). If he weirds us out, maybe the shortcoming, the failure of understanding, is our own, mere mortals that we be.

It’s probably safe to say that, for most readers, all of the Bundrens seem pretty eccentric in one way or another. But it’s notable that Darl is the only one who seems to strike the people around him as strange. Anse’s eccentricity can be understood—it might be criticized, it might exasperate people, but ultimately it makes sense to them as “Anse just being Anse,” “doing the best he can”—whereas Darl’s just doesn’t make sense. What’s he always thinking about? Why do his eyes always look so far away, “full of the land”? It’s worth noting that, as readers of his chapters—he is the most frequent narrator, and his chapters tend to be longer and more developed—our picture of Darl is quite different from how he appears to those around him. He doesn’t seem spacey to us; he seems hyperperceptive, with a ridiculous vocabulary, and we almost don’t notice that he rarely seems to be doing much of anything in most of these scenes. He’s the quiet observer, taking it all in, and for some reason, this makes everyone a little uneasy in his presence.

Tull describes “the Darl effect” memorably: “He dont say nothing; just looks at me with them queer eyes of hisn that makes folks talk. I always say it aint never been what he done so much or said or anything so much as how he looks at you. It’s like he had got inside you someway. Like somehow you was looking at yourself and your doings outen his eyes” (125). It’s as if people can feel Darl looking at them—through them. Almost as if they are being narrated by him. And readers notice some of Darl’s uncanny perceptiveness as well, when his narrative point of view departs from his body and views himself from a distance, seeing Jewel’s head bobbing along behind him from somewhere distant in front of him in the opening chapter, or when he narrates in great detail scenes he did not witness firsthand. Some critics have straight-up described Darl as “clairvoyant,” and the novel does seem to grant him a form of extrasensory perception. Dewey Dell describes the disturbing awareness that Darl somehow knows her secret—“I saw Darl and he knew. He said he knew without the words like he told me that ma is going to die without the words” (27)—in terms that recall Tull’s discomfort with “how he looks at you.” And Darl himself describes how he became aware of his mother’s infidelity, without actually “knowing” firsthand, as he observes her sitting vigil next to Jewel’s bed: “And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day” (136). He seems a little freaked out by his own ability to just know things he maybe wishes he didn’t.

But for the reader, while some of this might make Darl seem “queer” or strange, paradoxically he is the most reliable anchor we’ve got in this fictional world. The very “clairvoyance” that gives others the creeps makes him able to narrate with a striking degree of perceptiveness. The “knowledge”—he’s the only one alive (aside from Whitfield, who doesn’t appear to be talking) who knows about Addie’s infidelity and Jewel’s real father—is largely what makes him a good narrator. The other characters, for the most part, don’t seem like they’re telling a story so much as spilling their unconnected stream of consciousness onto the page. Vardaman is the most extreme of these highly subjective narrators—his private language is almost impenetrable—but Dewey Dell too is (understandably) immersed in her own world and her own private troubles. Cash’s narration keeps getting cut off mid-sentence, as he goes on about “making it on the bevel” and setting the coffin “on the balance,” creating the impression that he is too eager to get back to work to waste time narrating. Anse is immersed in lamenting his own suffering and bad luck. But Darl almost never talks about himself. It’s ironic that the one everyone else sees as so self-absorbed and dreamy is the least subjective of the narrators. He’s so non-subjective, he’s even able to narrate in detail scenes at which he isn’t even present.

The quintessential moments in As I Lay Dying are mostly narrated by Darl, and two of these he’s not present for. In a chapter in the middle of the novel (128-36), Darl gives us the full, linear story of Jewel at age fifteen sneaking off to work at night and earn money to buy the horse. Darl himself is mostly absent from the story, included in the “we” who react to Jewel riding up on his horse, but mostly focusing on his mother, father, brother, and sister. He seems like a reliable narrator precisely because he doesn’t reveal a strong opinion about the horse (as opposed to how Anse might narrate this episode, for example). He doesn’t put himself into the story, but merely records the words and actions of others. We can imagine him throughout these events, with “the land in his eyes,” acting “queer”—but the detailed narrative he delivers shows that he’s paying attention, and that he’s both intelligent and perceptive. (He’d make a good novelist, actually.)

Two scenes he narrates that are central to the novel and that he isn’t even present for likewise reflect Darl’s remarkable literary abilities. We could get hung up on the question of how he even “knows” all this stuff is happening back home when he’s stuck in a stranger’s barn hiding from the rain with Jewel. But we don’t, I think, because his narrative is so plausible in its rendering of character. The stuff he tells us feels accurate. I’ll focus on two parallel moments, both involving Anse, to illustrate.

Just after Addie has died, Darl portrays Anse as having been left alone with her in the room. He “stands over the bed, dangle-armed, humped, motionless. He raises his hand to his head, scouring his hair, listening to the saw” (51-52). He awkwardly rubs his hand on his thigh (we recognize the classic Anse gesture) and “lays it on her face and then on the hump of quilt where her hands are. He touches the quilt as he saw Dewey Dell do, trying to smooth it up to the chin, but disarranging it instead. He tries to smooth it again, clumsily, his hand awkward as a claw smoothing at the wrinkles which he made and which continue to emerge beneath his hand with perverse ubiquity, so that at last he desists, his hand falling to his side” (52). Questions of “reliability” do not arise here—there’s little point in wondering if Anse “really did” all this. It feels so right, it so compactly captures his awkwardness, his confusion, his inarticulable grief and his bewilderment as to how to express it. He’s left to clumsily imitate Dewey Dell’s simple gesture of raising the quilt to her mother’s chin, but all he does is screw it up, and then his efforts to fix it screw it up even worse. He finally gives up, mute and perplexed. And then he says, out loud, “God’s will be done. . . . Now I can get them teeth” (52). We have Anse in a nutshell here—that infuriating combination of poignant grief, dedication to his wife’s memory and his vow to return her to her people’s land, and his self-serving desire to finally get them teeth.

There’s a similar moment in Darl’s next chapter, where he narrates, in similar detail, the scene where everyone sits around in the rain while Cash finishes the coffin. Cash tells his father to “go on in. . . . Me and Vernon can finish it” (78). (He hasn’t been all that much help anyway.) “Pa looks at them. The sleeves of Jewel’s coat are too short for him. Upon his face the rain streams, slow as cold glycerin. ‘I dont begrudge her the wetting,’ he says. He moves again and falls to shifting the planks, picking them up, laying them down again carefully, as though they are glass. He goes to the lantern and pulls at the propped raincoat until he knocks it down and Cash comes and fixes it back” (78). Not only is he not helping, going through this meaningless gesture of picking up and setting down the planks; he’s making a mess (like with Addie’s quilt), and Cash has to stop working and come over to clean up after him. It would be better if Anse just didn’t touch anything, or do anything. “You go in the house,” Cash tells him (78). But there’s a poignance to Darl’s portrait of his father here, an awareness of an emotional depth that may not be evident to everyone else, and often isn’t evident to readers. He literally doesn’t know what to do with himself. He’s beside himself with grief. And he maybe doesn’t relish the idea of going in the house and sitting with his wife’s body. He wants to be out here, among the men. But he’s just getting wet and getting in the way, knocking stuff over, in a coat that doesn’t fit.

Perhaps this does reflect Darl’s subjective view of his father. Perhaps he’s making this all up, or imagining it. But for readers of the novel, these scenes are as vivid and detailed as anything else in the book, and I for one am not at all troubled by the fact that Darl seems to be imagining them. Like good fiction, they feel right.