In White Boy Shuffle the novels concludes with a seemingly very perplexing and potentially controversial ending. Starting with Gunnar's speech at Boston University he seemingly endorses the idea of mass suicide on the part of African Americans as a way of showing their devotion to the cause. Immediately this has repercussions as people all over the country start to commit suicide and send Gunnar their death poems. This includes Nick Scoby, who after a discussion with Gunnar about suicide hikes to the top of the Boston University Law Building, writes Gunnar a letter, and then throws himself of the top of the building.
The suicide doesn't stop at Scoby, however. As Gunnar is staying in Hillside at his new hotel home, he receives letter after letter containing poems written by African Americans who have committed suicide after being provoked by some racial injustice committed against them. During all this Gunnar and company are reading Japanese love-suicide stories. Clearly these works of literature are a major influence on Gunnar's perception of suicide and death, and after nearly committing suicide by drowning himself Gunnar states, "What the fuck, it took Osamu Dazai three ir four times to get this suicide thing right" (209).
By the end of the novel we have reached the unlikely scenario in which Gunnar, during a memorial for Scoby has revealed the existence of a remaining atom bomb, and has dared the U.S. government to drop the bomb on Hillside. While this is a seemingly preposterous scenario, I think the message is clear; race relations in the U.S. are so hopelessly misbalanced that there can be no fixing. The only reasonable option from here is mass suicide. At least this is the message that Gunnar gets across to African-Americans.
The concept of suicide being a reasonable option is a hard concept to grasp for people in our society, but to Gunnar perhaps it made sense. Gunnar had recently been reading japanese love-suicide stories in which suicide was not seen as a dishonorable action, but in fact a fairly honorable mode of death. I think even more importantly is that Gunnar feels as though in life he has absolutely no control. In a way I think Gunnar is supposed to see suicide as the only way that he can take control of a life which he feels is otherwise out of his control. As he says "You may love me, but I'm tired of thrashing around in the mud and not getting anywhere, so put a nigger out of his misery" (226). I think that Bigger sees the best way for himself to take control of his life is to end it. In this way he takes control of really the only aspect of his life that he feels that he can possibly control, which is his own death. Suicide as a reasonable option is hard for members of our society to understand, but for Gunnar he feels that his situation is so bad that the only way for him to take control of his life is for him to decide to end it.
An important qualification, I think, is that the people who follow Gunnar's lead and send him suicide poems aren't always responding to some specific act of injustice--it isn't a case of reflex rage or self-negation, which could seem like "hurt feelings." There's this sense of general futility, of people who have been playing by the rules and swallowing little slights and insults and belittlements every day and are finally, paradoxically, taking control of their lives in the most radical way imaginable. The fact that so many of the suicides are "successful"--not obviously "victims"--is a crucial part of the challenge they pose to the reader.
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