Tuff 2

I was just as pleased with the second half of this book as the first, and it is still my favorite of the semester. I think the fact that Tuffy didn't win the election kind of goes along with the postmodern genre's nihilistic nature. Tuffy doesn't really seem to care, and he even states that if he went to college, all he'd be taking up was space (256). He seems to have found something in himself which suggested he could change his neighborhood/city/the world, but then he lost it. I think this was Beatty's way of showing the current problem in the African American society (and American youth in general), of not believing they can make a change or advancements in the problems of racism. Beatty also took an opprtunity towards the end of the novel to make a statement about diversity, and I think issues about the diversity of the American literary canon tie into this. Yolanda explains the theory of Gestalt to Winston. She says, "When we see something that is divided up in parts, we tend to see the whole thing, not the individual units" (256). I think here Beatty is making a comment about African Americans and all other minorities being overshadowed in America. This includes literary works. It also might be an explanation of stereotypes; we see all the members of a group as a stereotype instead of looking at their individual personalities. We assume things based on people's outward appearances, which is why Beatty's readers might have been shocked to see that Winston was so knowledgable about film, or Yolanda about psychology. I think with this novel, Beatty really breaks a lot of boundaries and hits his readers hard with thoughts of stereotypes and race. I'd definitely reccommend this book to all my friends, in fact, I already have. Satire being the popular genre of today, I think Beatty's book has more of an effect on younger readers.