John Okada's No-No Boy

One of the major issues explored in John Okada's novel No-No Boy is the issue of free will. In general, the novel examines relations between Japanese-Americans and white Americans, and focuses especially on the image that Japanese-Americans have of themselves. The question of free will involves inevitably the question of its opposite---determinism. Are the characters in this novel free to change their attitudes and their behavior, or are they helpless victims of environmental, psychological, racial and other circumstances? Clearly, Okada is a writer who holds out hope that racial hatred and self-hatred can be reduced, if not eliminated. For him to hold out such hope, he must have some faith and some evidence that human beings are capable of making free choices which will lead to such change. At the same time, the novel is full of realistic scenes of hatred and self-hatred which make it clear that the author is not naive about the likelihood of change through the free will of human beings.

Okada introduces us to Ichiro in the context of free will. Ichiro refused to be inducted into the army: " . . . Of his own free will, he had stood before the judge and said that he would not go in the army. At the time there was no other choice for him" (Okada 1). How can it be an act of "his own free will" if he had "no other choice"? The reality, of course, is that, as Okada knows, a certain amount of free will and a certain amount of determinism are at work in conjunction in the life o

Related Essays

The immigrant experience in America .... The Japanese experience is detailed by Joy Kogawa and John Okada in two separate novels. .... Obasan. Boston: David R. Godine. Okada, John. (1976). No-no boy. .... (2108 8 )

Package Design in Japan .... Okada works with a typographer in the creation of these packages that are both functional and highly artistic. 15. .... Tokyo: John Weatherhill, Inc., 1989. .... (2231 9 )

, the two will have a confrontation at some point. If it is inevitable, then it would seem that free will is not involved. It would seem that events had been started long before which propelled these individuals forward in time where they were destined to have this fight which would leave Freddie dead and which would apparently change Bull in a profound way. It seems that Okada is saying that free will exists in these human beings, but it slumbers dormant until some terrible pain awakens the individual to the fact that he must stop acting like a pre-destined robot and begin exercising his free will. It is Bull, rather than the doomed Freddie or the already-awakened Ichiro, who changes the most as the result of the fight and its aftermath. It is Bull who suddenly has the chance to freely choose to change his hateful ways, but it is a terrible fact that it may have taken the death of Freddie to awaken Bull to his own free will. Ichiro does not want to get involved in the fight between Bull and Freddie, and when he is told by another bar patron, "Stay out of it, fellow," Ichiro answers "I haven't got much choice" (Okada 246). The implication here is that he has no free will to decide whether to get involved or not. Of course, he

Category: Literature - J