The Ending of Passing: Making Sense of Chaos Eric Lees College

Nella Larsen’s novella Passing tells a compelling story about two mixed-race women, Irene and Clare, from drastically different outcomes who shape contrasting perspectives on the notion of “passing” as one race over another, as Irene is content with being her black self while Clare grew up as a white woman. This crescendo narrative escalates exponentially towards its explosive yet abrupt finale in which Clare falls out of a window and dies and Irene suffers a mental breakdown. The narrative takes a drastic turn from realism to a bizarre hyperreality drenched in subjectivity and impressionism. The ending is stylized to be vague on purpose, and many different interpretations can exist of it. Many readers will come up with different ideas about who murdered Clare, or if she was “murdered” to begin with, and these various interpretations impose different messages on relations between the characters and what they represent as motifs. Larsen projects the sensation of passing on the reader through how fractured and fragmented this finale is, which shows readers how fragmented one who passes through different races feels.

One possible interpretation is that Irene pushed Clare out of the window to her death. This appears to be the most...