Philosophical Pessimism and Narrative Undoing in Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys

This article argues that Colson Whitehead’s novel The Nickel Boys (2019) offers a model of narrative pessimism that contends with conflicting models of philosophical pessimism . The novel aligns with Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation, Vol. I (1818) through its belief in a universally governing logic of suffering within human experience, but it connects with Frank B. Wilderson III’s Afropessimism (2020) by identifying the embodied particularities of suffering perpetrated on Black Americans. Its frame structure employs strategic deception to foreground its pessimism, building toward the catharsis innate to its narrative formula before finally withholding that release. However, unlike the pessimism posited by Schopenhauer and, even more pressingly, by Wilderson, Whitehead’s novel implies the possibility of recuperation. The Nickel Boys thus offers an urgent, distinct, and complicated narrative expression of Black suffering.