ABSTRACT

This essay analyzes Colson Whitehead’s 2019 novel The Nickel Boys through the prism of the tension between concealment and unveiling, and its impact on the text’s rhetorical, narrative and ideological structure. The novel focuses on its main character’s experience of confinement at Nickel School, a juvenile correction institution. Like most prison narratives, it conceptualizes such experience in terms of an opposition between outside and inside, sliding over the legal and ethical dialectics between freedom and confinement. Thus, a rhetorical structure is articulated in the text around these and other parallel binaries: visible-concealed, public-secret/private. My interpretation of the novel relates these dichotomies to the pattern of confinement and redemption which is typical of the African American prison narrative. Furthermore, in terms of narrative progression, the text is organized as a structure of unveiling, in which the delayed disclosure of key information regarding the main characters forces a reconsideration of the entire sequence of events organized through causal relations. The novel relies on the mechanism of the “surprise ending” in order to solve its structural tensions, provoking not only the reconstruction of its lineal sequence, but a readjustment in the readers’ ethical judgment of what has been previously read.

摘要

这篇文章分析了科尔森怀特黑德 2019 年的小说《镍男孩》通过隐藏与揭露之间张力的棱镜，及其对文本修辞、叙事和意识形态结构的影响。小说主要讲述了主人公被关押在少年管教所镍学校的经历。像大多数监狱叙事一样，它将这种体验概念化为外部和内部之间的对立，滑过自由与监禁之间的法律和伦理辩证法。因此，围绕这些和其他平行二元的文本在文本中阐明了修辞结构：可见-隐藏，公开-秘密/私人。我对小说的解释将这些二分法与非裔美国人监狱叙事典型的监禁和救赎模式联系起来。此外，在叙事发展方面，文本被组织成一个揭幕的结构，其中关于主要人物的关键信息的延迟披露迫使人们重新考虑通过因果关系组织的整个事件序列。小说依靠“惊喜结局”的机制来解决其结构上的张力，不仅引发了其线性序列的重构，而且引发了读者对先前阅读内容的伦理判断的重新调整。