MISRECOGNITION AND STRUGGLE FOR IDENTITY OF BLACKS: A STUDY OF PAUL BEATTY’S THE WHITE BOY SHUFFLE AND THE SELLOUT

Abstract

Paul Beatty, a Booker Prize-winning novelist, has delineated the problems and issues of Afro-Americans in his novels. Beatty is the first American author who has won the Booker Prize in 2016 for The Sellout. The central aspect of Paul Beatty’s novels is to explore how being black affects the personality of Afro-Americans. He has discussed how whites belittle, subjugate, discriminate, and demoralize blacks in American society. Beatty’s characters struggle for their identity and home in America. These characters suffer from loss of identity, demonization, alienation, and racism. As a result, they feel void and identity crisis in their lives. In The White Boy Shuffle, Gunnar Kaufman confronts adjustment and settlement problems in his new cultural environment. He feels estranged and search for identity among whites in Santa Monica and later among blacks in West Los Angeles. Due to this, he has felt traumatized and dehumanized in American society. In The Sellout, the characters are oppressed and misrecognized. They are struggling on the basis of their race and ethnicity. Moreover, a community helps a person shape himself based on shared ideas, beliefs, values, and culture. A person’s identity is recognized from his roots and cultural values. The narrator ‘Me’ in the novel struggles for identity and justice when Dickens, a city in the ghetto community, is removed from the map. To bring Dickens back on the map, the narrator revives slavery and segregation. The focus of the research paper is to expose deprivation of social status, misrecognition, discrimination, dehumanization, demonization and struggle for identity of characters in Paul Beatty’s novels, especially The White Boy Shuffle and The Sellout.