White Rat is a short story written by Gayl Jones in 1977. The White Rat is told through a narrator who is known to many of his close friends as the “white rat”, and this is because of his very white skin color while being an African-America. The short story details the White Rat’s relationship with his wife Maggie and how they have recently had trouble due to the birth of their child “little Henry” and his clubbed foot. White Rat’s alcoholism leads Maggie to leave him and run off with another man named JT, but when JT soon leaves Maggie, she has to return to the narrator pregnant with JT’s baby- or so we think. While all this drama ensues we also are witnesses to the narrator’s flashbacks of how he has had to deal with being a very fair skinned African-American.
This text is organized in a very unique way where the audience is brought back and forth between the past and present through the narrator’s eyes. Through this literary technique the audience is able to see the narrator’s struggles from the past and how it has shaped him into the person we now see in the present. The audience is able to see how the narrator’s skin tone has brought many unwanted challenges into his life and how that has left some negative impacts on him. Lastly, the audience is able to figure out that the narrator is a very sorrowful and regretful man in the end and wants to try and make things right with his wife Maggie.
I thought this text was really interesting and I really liked the unique way it was written. Due to the transition of the tenses, the author made me slow down while reading and really take in all the information in each sentence. This was able to help me figure out the challenges that the narrator has gone through and also allowed me to pick up on some minor details that I may have missed, like the fact that the narrator does not think that Maggie is pregnant and that in the end bar scene I believe that the priest the narrator talks about is actually himself.
Michael Powers