The final post of my high school career, B!!! How crazy is that?
I wasn't really sure onn what to write my blog post about with this novel, because it's a difficult one to relate to on the surface. Benji is a black boy, he has a summer house, he lives in the city -- there's a whole laundry list of conditions of existence that I just don't have in common with him. And, yet, I also found some of the lessons Benji was learning throughout this novel so incredibly poignant and familiar. Particular, there's this recurring theme of duality, conflict of identities, and "posing" that, in my opinion, is an integral part of any coming of age story, regardless of the rest of someone's identity.
For Benji, this seems to manifest in a couple of ways, generally positioned around the premise of his confusing racial condition. Benji is a black boy with a beach house, stuck in an awkward position between pride for his race, acceptance of his socioeconomic state, distance from his school peers, and distance from his Sag Harbor buds (in the words of Earl Sweatshirt, Benji at the beginning of this novel might feel like he's "too black for the white kids and too white for the blacks").
Benji's novel-long struggle with identity and self presentation is such a crucial part of this book, undeniably. His willingness to ebb and flow, and his sort of hesitance to put up fronts, in my opinion, are what make him such a likable character. If he had wanted to front he'd still be an interesting narrator, but there's something about his sort of disenchantment with being a poser, that sense of disillusionment. Of course, I think this has a lot to do with Ben being the narrator, and having that space to analyze Benji's behavior. Nonetheless, it's not mocking poserism, and Ben never seems to dislike poser behavior, but the ability to see how those attitudes pan out after the novel takes place, I think, gives Ben the space to critique them (think of the literal posing with guns and the eventual gun violence that seeps into the gang -- he's certainly not fond of the way that the fake ones sort of plant that seed in his friends).
I guess I don't really have a point with this post, I just really enjoyed that part of Benji. It's rather refreshing and appealing, and I guess Ben has a great amount of distance from which he can reflect on his days in Sag. Anyway, that's it!!
