Closing the book on an open text

"Tell us your theory," my students demanded, but I wouldn't do it--not until they told me their own. We've been reading Colson Whitehead's John Henry Days and they, like many readers, were frustrated by the ambiguity of the ending: Does J. Sutter live or die, stay at the festival and get shot or go back to New York with Pamela and start writing a different type of story? Is he supposed to be a twenty-first century John Henry or is all that historical stuff a big red herring? And why doesn't Whitehead offer any easy answers?

My students had to come up with answers for an essay due today, drawing their own conclusions about J. Sutter's fate based upon evidence from within the text. Last Friday they asked me to tell them my own interpretation but I refused, promising instead that I would reveal my conclusions after they'd written their papers and shared their ideas with the class. 

So that's what we did today: each student explained the conclusions they had drawn about J. Sutter's fate, and, unsurprisingly, no two students agreed entirely. The remarkable thing was that each of these competing interpretations was entirely defensible based on the evidence provided within the novel. We chewed on that for a while before they asked me to give them my theory.

I read them a piece of the article I published about the novel eight years ago, an extremely obscure publication that I knew they wouldn't be able to locate locally without breaking into my office, and we talked a little bit about how Whitehead invites readers to fill the gaps in the narrative by adding their own verses to the John Henry legend. But then I suggested an alternative explanation: maybe J. Sutter is just a human version of Schrodinger's cat. As long as he's trapped inside the box--the book--he exists simultaneously in all possible states, both alive and dead and every other possibility. When we open the box and try to take him out of his context, we either doom him to instant death or breathe new life into his body. Why not leave him in the box and let him experience pure possibility?

Here's what impresses me about this class: They can read a book that offers no obvious resolution, write an essay that requires them to draw their own conclusions, and then engage in discussion that challenges all their expectations about literature, life, and the possibility of interpretation, and then they can come back and do it all over again on Wednesday and Friday and again next Monday. And if that doesn't make my job worth doing, nothing else will.