Gunnar's Self-Discovery
After reading the end of The White Boy Shuffle , I began thinking of how much had changed from the beginning to the end of the novel. Moving from chapter to chapter, I initially felt that there wasn’t much connectivity and each chapter could essentially be read on its own. However, as we got closer to the end of the novel, the biggest transformation I noticed was Gunnar’s personality. At the beginning of the novel, Beatty depicts Gunnar as an educated but naïve child who is manipulated and controlled to a degree by the white society he lives in. Although he had a multiculturalistic education, white people were treating him as a commodity and viewing him as “another black person” rather than an individual. Over the course of the novel, Gunnar realizes his true “purpose” in life despite what society chooses for him. Gunnar’s upbringing is an interesting one – one that is very different from wha...