In the days since I was so profoundly affected by the twist at the end of Colson Whitehead's The Nickel Boys, I've been thinking about how he does it--and, more importantly, why it matters. The Nickel Boys would be an interesting and even important novel without the shift in perspective at the end, but that shift makes it a masterpiece, and it's worth thinking about what Whitehead is up to because it raises questions about how we conceive of justice and the value of human lives.
In some ways The Nickel Boys reminds me of Toni Morrison's Paradise, which opens with "They shoot the white girl first" but then never clearly reveals which of the girls is white. You can comb the book for clues and admire the way Morrison blurs details to make it impossible to identify the white girl, but eventually you have to ask yourself the bigger question: Why do I care? Why am I obsessing over variations of skin color, and doesn't that obsession link me with the more reprehensible characters in the novel?
Similarly, it's easy to examine The Nickel Boys and see how Whitehead achieves his sleight of hand: The fairly conventional third-person narrative lulls readers into accepting what appears to be happening, so it's easy to overlook the subtle clues that all is not as it appears. After I finished the novel, I turned back to the Prologue and found a simple phrase that would have given away the game if I'd noticed it the first time through, but the phrase is so mundane and innocuous that only the most paranoid reader would interrogate its intent. And then Whitehead unfolds the plot and controls perspective so carefully that we just follow along unquestioningly until the twist slams us right between the eyeballs.
And now to the delicate part: I don't want to reveal details of the twist, but in essence, it involves an unexpected death. In a book full of unexpected deaths, what makes this one so shocking? What I keep coming back to is this: The wrong person died.
Think about that for a minute.
To say that the wrong person died implies that someone else would have been the right person--and not only that, but that I am uniquely qualified to judge which of several equally (un)deserving characters should die and which should live. Ouch.
Not only that, but Whitehead has been warning all along that this novel takes place in a context where justice is arbitrary, where there's no clear relationship between actions and consequences, where punishment falls brutally on whoever happens to wander into its path. If we buy into Whitehead's premise, then no death should be unexpected, so the fact that the twist is so shocking suggests that we've been holding on to the conviction that justice will be served in this special case regardless of its arbitrary nature elsewhere. The twist reveals that we've been fools all along: the game is rigged and our hopes for a special dispensation are empty.
And this, I think, is what makes the novel so powerful: We can read about the horrors of Nickel Academy and comfort ourselves with the assurance that life outside Nickel is more just, more tolerant, more fair than life inside, but the twist at the end suggests that there is no inside or outside because Nickel is everywhere. This is what hurts the most: not the death of a character, but the grievous injury to the dream that we can build a just and equitable society.
But that doesn't mean we should stop trying. Sometimes the only blow we can strike against injustice is simply to bear witness, and that's exactly what Whitehead does so powerfully in The Nickel Boys and why it's worth reading despite the pain.
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