Silencing the Speaker
What really stuck out to me (which I pointed out in class briefly yesterday) is the amount of silence in Native Speaker. So much is said through nothing at all that the cold stares and non-existent conversations of Henry and his family, and later Henry and Lelia define the novel in many ways.
One of the really stunning examples of this is the death of Henry’s mother, who is always called either “mother” or “spouse,” and is characterized so slimly, like Ajuhma, that more is told about her by her silence and lack of emotion than if she were to be given lots of dialogue. That Henry’s father refuses to say anything about his spouse’s illness, and when he does, he ends up lying about it sets the stage for Henry’s silence and manipulative nature later on: “I have trouble remembering the details of her illness because she and my father kept it from me until they couldn’t hide it any longer…for me it was more a disappearance than a death” (77).
The lack of any real dialogue about Henry’s mother or her death reminds me of the similarly obscured death of Mitt, which is foreshadowed, and hinted at, but never fully explained. Apparently, the lack of explanation isn’t only true for the reader, Henry and Lelia also refuse to discuss their son’s death. Lelia calls Henry out on his silence in an argument following their separation: “You haven’t said his name more than four or five times since it happened. You haven’t said his name tonight. Maybe you’ve talked all this time with Jack about him, maybe you says his name in your sleep, but we’ve never really talked about it, we haven’t really come right out together and said it, really named what happened for what it was” (129). Clearly, Lelia is in a lot of pain here, and though expressed in a different way, so is Henry. Just as the novel is structured, Henry cannot bring up the issues that really matter without skirting around them on tangents and inventing multiple selves to share the burden of the truth. With this argument, the question of truth comes up–what did really happen with Mitt? Who is Henry?
The problem is, it seems that we the reader, and Henry the narrator do not actually know the events of his life. Mirroring a statement made after we’re told about Mitt’s death, “I’ve read the dying feel no pain but sense everything that goes on around them. They view the scene from a brief distance…but we are the living on the ground, and what we know is narrow and broken” (106). It would seem that Henry, from this viewpoint on life and death, at least, is not really sure if he’s dead or alive. If we consider the lack of openly stated emotions for the majority of the novel, it makes sense that Henry is dead in a sense, at least socially.
I think that Mitt’s death is closely related to the silence of language in the novel. He is suffocated to death because he was under a dog pile, why didn’t he scream or say something? His death was silent which goes along with this theme of spoken and non-spoken communication and language in this novel.
I could be totally off on this but I read the silence as being a trait of the Korean culture. The person it seems most to bother is Lelia, who is depicted as being one of the only genuine Americans in the novel. Henry talks about the country’s of origin of most of the other characters, but from what I remember Lelia is just from Massachusetts. The idea of talking and sharing feelings seems to be tied to being American in this novel. Also, brilliant ending about Henry being socially dead–I think that seems like a true statement so far in the novel.
Dan–
I agree with ending of your post, the notion about ” Henry being socially dead” It seems that Henry really annoyed Lelia with the secretive nature of his job, and I also think this idea ties in with the fact that Henry felt he knew many things–which was the problem. I agree with Becca in that the American culture is constantly open, and sharing feelings and in the Korean culture, things are kept silent. Overall I enjoyed the spin you put on the novel. Great Job!