Benji Spends the Whole Summer Trying to Be Ben

The thing Benji decides at the start of the summer is that he is going to be Ben now. Not Benji. Benji is the kid name, the little brother name, the name that comes with being half of a matched set with Reggie. Ben is supposed to be the version of him that girls notice and friends respect. And what gets me about the book is that the name basically never sticks. He announces it and then spends three hundred pages still being Benji, still mumbling, still hanging back. Whitehead is pretty honest that reinvention is a thing you declare way more than a thing you actually pull off. The summer is not Benji becoming Ben. It is Benji finding out how slow that actually goes.

Part of why it does not stick is that he was never one person to begin with. He says he and Reggie "had recently ceased to be twins. We were born ten months apart and until I went to high school we came as a matched set, more Siamese than fraternal or identical, defined by an uncanny inseparability" (Whitehead 6). So before he can be Ben he has to come unstuck from Reggie first, and that is its own loss, not just a quick upgrade. The other problem is that he already knows how people see him and he kind of helps them do it. He admits that "I came over time to believe that no one was particularly interested in what I had to say, I tended to mumble or talk fast in an attempt to help people more easily ignore me" (Whitehead 237). You cannot just rename yourself out of a habit like that. The mumble is the thing actually running the problem here, not the name.

What I think the book ends on is that growing up is not a switch you flip at the start of summer. Benji wants the new identity to arrive all at once, already done, and instead he gets a summer of small embarrassing in-between moments. By the end he has changed, but not into the person he announced in June. He changed in the way people actually change, which is slow and a little messy and mostly without noticing. Benji had a whole plan to be Ben by the end of summer, but the kid who ended up showing up in September was just a slightly different Benji.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Real Catcher

Everyone talks about how Phoebe represents childhood innocence in The Catcher in the Rye, but I think that completely misses what she’s actually doing for Holden. She is not just a “pure” or “innocent” kid; she is his conscience. She’s the person who sees through all his bullshit and actually holds him accountable.  Throughout the whole novel, Holden is desperately searching for a human connection. He tries talking to cab drivers, strangers on trains, people at bars, and really anyone who will listen. He never finds what he’s looking for, and he keeps spiraling deeper into his depression and loneliness. When Phoebe shows up, he finally gets what he has been craving. Someone real. Someone who will actually talk to him, not at him or past him. The second he tells her he’s home early from Pencey, she sees through it immediately. “You did get kicked out! You did!” she says and then hits him (214). She’s not playing along with his fantasies or letting him hide behind his facade of lies...
Read more

Dodo Conway and the "American Dream" Esther Never Wanted

Dodo Conway is barely in The Bell Jar, but I think she might be one of the most important characters in it. Even her name feels deliberate. Plath seems to have quite literally named this woman after an extinct bird, and not just any bird. The dodo was flightless, studied and catalogued by scientists like a specimen before it went extinct, defined almost entirely by its biology and its inability to go, quite literally, anywhere. Plath naming this character Dodo doesn't feel like a coincidence. She lives next door to Esther's family, and every time she appears, she is pregnant, pushing a baby carriage and trailed by "two or three small children…wobbled along in the shadow of her skirts" (Plath 116). She is not presented as miserable or trapped. She is devoted to her life, almost radiant in it, and that is exactly what makes her so unsettling to read. Plath doesn't use Dodo to argue that domesticity is a trap for all women. She uses her to show that it doesn't ma...
Read more

Alison and Bruce Bechdel Were Each Other's Inverse

One of the hardest things to ignore about Fun Home is how clearly Alison and Bruce needed each other to be something neither of them could be. They were almost like reversed mirrors. Alison grows up tomboyish, always leaning toward short hair and men's clothing, and Bruce spends his life restoring their Victorian house with this obsessive attention to beauty, to curtains and wallpaper and flowers. Bechdel draws this contrast constantly, but nowhere more clearly than in the barrette scene. Bruce asks young Alison where her barrette is, tells her it keeps the hair out of her eyes, and she fires back at her father, "So would a crewcut" (Bechdel 96). And that is basically their entire relationship shown in those two panels. Bruce is trying to pin femininity onto his daughter, almost literally, and she is already pulling away from it without even thinking about it. Her cousins nickname her "Butch," and she loves it. Meanwhile, Bruce, who holds all this authority in ...
Read more