The Paradox of the Firefly, Greedo, and “the Other Boy”

One theme of Sag Harbor that comes up a lot, especially in the chapter “The Gangsters,” is the concept of being two opposite things at once—a “paradox,” as Ben puts it in “The Heyday of Dag” (Whitehead 57). Ben describes that he and his friends at Sag were to outsiders “the definition of paradox: black boys with beach houses” (Whitehead 57). He then outlines the paths that they could take: embrace the beach part, the black part, or, as he puts it, “embrace the contradiction, say, what you call paradox, I call myself” (Whitehead 58). Benji is a paradox, but he can embrace both parts that of himself that are seemingly paradoxical—he can be both a black boy and have a beach house. To him, this concept is not impossible.

Ben continues to embrace apparent paradoxes in “The Gangsters,” with a firefly he sees during the BB gun fight, and the changes made to Greedo in the rerelease of Star Wars. While looking at the firefly, he contemplates how the firefly was named after the part that makes it to visible, though it spends most of its life not glowing. He concludes that “it was a bad name because it was incomplete—both parts were true, the bright and the dark, the one we could see and the other one we couldn’t. It was both” (Whitehead 153). This connects well to the earlier paradox of Benji and the other boys—in the same way that they are both black and have beach houses, the firefly is both bright and dark.

Just a few pages later, he comes to the same conclusion when contemplating the changes made to Greedo. In the initial release of Star Wars, Han Solo shoots Greedo first to protect himself. However, in the rerelease, the movie is changed to have Greedo shoot first, making him the clear villain to the hero, Han Solo. Ben describes how people were upset at the change, but how he wasn’t, as he thinks that Greedo didn’t change. He says, “There was the first Greedo, the one we knew, and the other Greedo, the new one that emerged to change the meaning of things. To me they’re both real” (Whitehead 157). Greedo both shot first and didn’t shoot first—another paradox that Ben embraces.

Yet, despite embracing these many paradoxes throughout the story, Ben (the narrator) struggles to embrace the paradox that is himself. At the end of the chapter, Ben describes how he likes to tell people in his adult life about the BB in his eye socket, and “surprise them with the other boy” (Whitehead 159). He refers to his younger self as “the other boy,” implying a large separation between the two. However, the BB is importantly still there in his eye, showing that, despite whatever changes he goes through and however he grows (Ben is vague about the details), Ben is still the same person as Benji. In this class we’ve implied a separation between them, referring to the character in the story as Benji and the older narrator as Ben. But they are ultimately the same person, and I find it interesting that, despite the fact that Ben has no issues with Greedo being the same person or the firefly being both bright and dark, Ben does not see himself as the same person as his younger self. He cannot see past the paradox of being the younger kid who had a BB gun fight for fun and an educated adult man, and he cannot embrace being both.

What’s interesting is that I think we can kind of see Benji turning a bit more into Ben at the very end of the book. Melanie calls him “Ben” and is the first person to actually do so despite all of Benji’s attempts to become “Ben” (Whitehead 238). This shift shows that there is a level of transformation going on with him, as he has his first success in his plan for reinvention. This also gets him closer to the narrator who introduces himself as “Ben” at the start of the novel (Whitehead 2). In Benji’s final monologue, where he prepares to reinvent himself for the school year, he says, “People called me Benji but that didn’t mean I wasn’t Ben” (Whitehead 272). Benji embraces that he is both Benji and Ben, despite Ben’s struggles with doing the same. Ultimately, Ben and Benji are the same person, just at different stages in his life, with different experiences and views.