Toward the end of Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys (2019), readers discover that the protagonist, Elwood Curtis, is actually another character, Jack Turner. A flashback reveals that Turner takes the identity of Curtis after the latter dies in their escape attempt from the Nickel Academy, a juvenile reformatory in Florida. This surprising reversal of perspective forces readers to reconsider all that they have just read. The epilogue suggests that Turner took Curtis’s name “[t]o live for him” (Whitehead 202) and had been retelling Curtis’s story for years, in an ongoing attempt to get “it right” (Whitehead 204). Foregrounding processes of revision and repetition, the novel possesses an enclosed and a recursive structure, which gets narratively thematized as a tautological circle. Tautology seems to promote an arrangement that goes nowhere, but I focus on the potential of tautology to figure emancipation and freedom in narrative plotting. I locate, then, a productive force in this ostensibly non-productive figure, and I argue that Whitehead confronts the vicious circles of anti-Blackness with ‘counter-tautologies’ of emancipation and freedom that figure new forms of Black life.

Keywords: Colson Whitehead; tautology; anti-Blackness; Black life; narrative form