Suicide as an act of rebellion

The White Boy Shuffle by Paul Beatty begins and commences with a common theme: Suicide. In the prologue at the beginning of the novel, the black population of America is heading to its voluntary doom. Throughout the last few chapters of the novel, the theme of suicide is very heavily prevalent. Gunnar gives a speech at Boston University calling on those who truly care about the black struggle to kill themselves. Later, his best friend Nick Scoby, who’d experienced depression throughout past chapters, commits suicide. Then Gunnar himself attempts to drown in the ocean but ultimately gives up. The novel ultimately ends with Gunnar explaining his justification for suicide and talking about how his father killed himself.

Gunnar feels the need to justify suicide because Psycho Loco questions the effectiveness of doing so. The general perception of suicide is that it is merely giving in. It’s giving in to every force that wishes to take you down, because this is what they want. This is a rather simplistically bleak view of suicide and one that has been shoved down our throats through nearly every form of media. We patronize the suicidal man or woman too much, offering them very little agency.

While it is doubtless suicide is very often a deeply tragic event, it can also be much more. It can be an act of rebellion. I remember Mr. Butler talking to us about sailors who sank their own ships to prevent them from getting into enemy hands. In doing so, they took away a potential asset from the enemy. Gunnar may be doing very much the same thing. He has an ancestral pattern of not fighting the system, of giving into the white man, the most recent of which is his father who was a police officer that went along with his coworkers’ racist jokes. He may be afraid that by continuing to exist, he runs the risk of becoming part of the system. By killing himself, he removes any power that the white man may have over him and thereby maintains his agency and power over himself and his body.

This act is made even more rebellious when one remembers that Gunnar is a black man. Mental illness and suicide is something that has often been disregarded among nonwhite communities. It is seen as something that people of color, specifically men of color, do not suffer from. In Isaiah Rashad’s Heavenly Father which Saahithi read last quarter, Rashad talks about how no one would listen to his raps if he talked about his depressions and suicidal thoughts. Black men are thought to be tough and violent to others, not emotional and willing to hurt themselves. By choosing suicide, he and Scoby defy the expectations set forth for them.

Additionally, the idea of an honorable suicide is one derived from Japanese culture. It is a distinctly un-American idea, and therefore rejecting American values.