I've been thinking about friendship a lot lately.
More specifically, what it means to be a good friend, and why I was suspicious of Gunnar's friend group in Santa Monica.
Gunnar tells the reader that he's known as the "cool funny black guy" among his friends. This implies that Gunnar's friends like him because he's cool and funny and black. This immediately made me wonder what would happen if Gunnar had a bad day. What if Gunnar didn't feel up to making jokes? Would his friends ask him if he was okay? Would they make an effort to support him? Or would they scoff at his inability to entertain and ignore him for the rest of the day?
I'm not saying labels are automatically a bad thing. Most people have labels within their friend groups. There's the soccer mom, the party animal, the jokester, the therapist, the hot mess, the one who's perpetually single, you know. But, in a healthy friend group, these labels are only surface-level. They don't define your entire personality, and your friends don't treat you as such. The problem is, I'm not convinced that Gunnar's friend group transcends surface-level.
Mr. Mitchell mentioned the concept of a "mascot" at the end of class the other day. I think this is a possible analogy for Gunnar's role in his Santa Monica friend group. Gunnar is the kid who gets up and tells a joke, making everyone turn to each other and laugh ("dude he really is funny!") before going back to whatever white things they were previously discussing. Gunnar is not a person in the same way his other friends are to one another. He is 2D, a projection of his friends' expectations of him, never fully seen. If this is giving you Invisible Man vibes, good! Same here.
Gunnar's friendship with David seems more real. They spend more time together, geeking out over WWII aircrafts and other bizarre warfare trivia. I'm wondering whether David being a Jew has anything to do with this more developed friendship. He is a different kind of minority and perhaps feels ostracized in a similar way Gunnar does. I'm not trying to compare the plight of black people to Jews here, but maybe Gunnar and David have more common ground than they do with their other friends. They see each other more clearly than the other boys see them.
Awesome post! I think you're really right about the Invisible Man connection and how Gunnar is just a 2D character to his Santa Monica friends. But also, I think you bring an interesting point about Black-Jewish relations, and whether that has to do with their friendship. I think that here on an individual level Gunnar and David probably related more because of exactly what you said -they've both been ostracized, and recognize that both historically and contemporarily. It's kind of like the relationship between Max and Bigger. But also in general, even though I can't really speak for either group, there's probably a lot of complexities regarding the Black-Jewish relationship.
ReplyDeleteI'm picking up what you're putting down. I've noticed that in most healthy friendships I've had that there are labels, but they don't truly define us as people. When Gunnar was around David, I feel as though he felt like he didn't have to be the token black guy of his friend group. Gunnar and David were indeed good friends. Nice blogpost! :)
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