1) In No-No Boy, I argued that John Okada narrates Ichiro’s journey from a sense of nothingness when the novel begins to a movement toward wholeness when the novel ends. I also argued that Okada uses the idea of modernism—the divided self in the aftermath of war—to give shape to Ichiro’s sense of being a broken subject. In the journey Ichiro takes in the novel, he encounters a series of people—Bull, his father, his mother, his brother Taro, Freddy, Kenji, Emi, Mr. Carrick.
Using the idea of modernism as discussed and two of these characters, write which you make an argument about this narrative of nothingness to wholeness. Consider what you think Ichiro’s state is at the end of the novel and what is the nature of the space between nothing and whole.