A Nostalgic Depiction of a Horrific Experience
“It’s still there. Under the skin. It’s good for a story, something to shock people with after I’ve known them for years and feel a need to surprise them with the other boy” (Whitehead 191). Colson Whitehead’s depiction of the BB gun incident is anything but pleasant. He describes, clinically, Benji's desperate attempts to cut the skin open with razor blades to extract a BB shot into his eye socket. Yet, for all its brutality, the scene is tinged with a kind of strange and nostalgic haze, like a movie flashback viewed through yellowed glass. It feels as though Ben is looking back at his younger self, Benji, with a kind of affection, savoring the memory despite its pain.
Sag Harbor is littered with nostalgic recounts of events that happened in Benji’s summer town on Long Island. In this specific instance, it is clear that the current day Ben has very little to do with the Benji that we spend the whole book learning. Ben only reveals the "other boy" to people he has known for years. The emotional distance between him and his childhood self is why he refers to his old self as “the other boy." I think that the tone of the narration suggests dissociation, but not complete rejection. Benji and Sag Harbor are sort of preserved in memory/frozen in time so Ben can visit them like visiting a museum. The BB is a perfect metaphor for this idea, as it is a tiny little artifact which is permanent and seemingly cherished even though it is painful.
Benji’s talks about his desire for reinvention one last time a week before his summer break ends. “First day of school, I’d walk in with a new jacked, some plain New Wave number, and my new pants, and combat boots. Start things off right” (Whitehead 328). This ritual of reinventing himself (or at least trying to) begins at the beginning of the novel when he tries to introduce himself as Ben. This is Benji’s effort to have some control over who he was becoming. He wants to reenter school not as a continuation of who he was when he left, but as a declaration of who he wants to be, the cool kid with combat boots and leather ties. This inclination towards rebirth forces the wedge between Benji the child and Ben the adult, leaving only little mementos like the BB to bridge the gap.
We see Benji inch closer to Ben as the summer progresses. “People called me Benji but that didn’t mean I wasn’t Ben” (Whitehead 328). This transition stage between the two names reflects on a transition stage between the “other boy” and the narrator. The whole novel shows Benji struggling to change into Ben. By the end, we see that Ben is not the result of Benji suddenly changing, but that Ben is defined by Benji’s experiences. The novel is set in the memories which crafted Ben, and these memories are the stories of Benji.
- Rishabh
Hi Rishabh, I agree that even with all the trauma there's still a tint of nostalgia in the way the events are told. He is still reminiscing about his experiences and I think that the blurred line between Ben and Benji can also blur the nostalgia that Benji definitely feels throughout the book.
ReplyDeleteHey Rishabh, I also wrote about nostalgia in Sag Harbor. Even though Ben distances himself o much from Benji, you do get a bit of a sense that he feels some nostalgia towards Sag Harbor and being young. I didn't think that Ben had pain for the past, but kind of a critical view of it. Great Post!
ReplyDeleteNice comparison of the whole rebirth and going from "what I was" to "what I want to be." The BB incident is definitely a perfect example of one of the "bridges" in Benji's coming of age and a rebirth moment, but serves as a reminder to be careful what you wish for. By taking the games a step too far, Benji paid a price so it was also a sort of humbling moment.
ReplyDeleteI like the reference to the start of the novel, where the narrator introduces himself to US as "Ben"--even as his stories mostly have to do with the strange, awkward, self-conscious kid who goes by "Benji." And the end of "The Gangsters" is one of the moments when we feel this palpable gap between the present-day narrator and his "character" in the novel, when Ben refers to how he likes to tell this story as an adult, in part to shock his sophisticated, highly educated friends with this perhaps surprising story about "that other boy." And even though he does go into excruciating detail with Benji and Reggie's efforts to remove the BB from Benji's eye socket (my least favorite passages to read in this novel!), I agree that there is an odd kind of nostalgia in this chapter.
ReplyDeleteI think I understand something of this dynamic, from personal experience. I've hinted at a few stories from my childhood in this class, but I haven't gone anywhere near a whole bunch of truly insane experiences I've had, which would be borderline inappropriate to talk about in class, but which might get something of a shocked reaction from an audience of peers if I were to tell them at a dinner party. I enjoyed a similar dearth of adult supervision as Benji and his crew, and me and my crew excelled at some very bad and dangerous ideas that were also weirdly fun and anarchic at the time. There's definitely some fascination with "the other kid," the fifteen-year-old me who went through these things, and when I do get into them (among family and close friends), it does sometimes seem like I'm describing a scene from a movie or something.
Hi Shabi! I completely agree with what you are saying, even though Benji has experienced some trauma it is very clear that he is still nostalgic about it. It is also interesting to look at Benjo and Ben separate and how they look at this trauma and nostalgia.
ReplyDeleteThis post was really interesting to think about. In my blog, I talked about the possibility that Benji may have never gone back to Sag Harbor after growing up. It makes me wonder, if something happened that caused Benji to drift away from his parents, could this nostalgic tone be because despite its abusive nature, Ben misses his childhood. I liked your use of a yellowed glass as a metaphor for how Ben describes his childhood. The BB incident is also a great example of this. Nice blog!
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