I thoroughly enjoyed reading Never Die Alone this week. The narrative flowed and was easy to grasp onto. The plot was exciting and I enjoyed the colloquialisms and banter of King David with the other men in the novel. It was easy to get swept up in the quick pacing and wanting to uncover the mystery of who King David is in Never Die Alone. This being said, I have a hard time framing this novel within the umbrella of noir.
My understanding of noir is that it is characterized by a dark theme and is a pessimistic story about a character entering a darkness, and emerging changed (for better or worse) because of it. “Never Die Alone” clearly has the atmosphere of noir because of how it lets the reader into the world of the urban underground. Each of the characters in this world are driven by lust and greed, which lead them into situations where they kill and get killed, ending up dead in a gutter, as was the case for most of Moon’s men, and almost for King David. However, this dark theme was undercut by the protagonist.
Paul is a sympathetic character, as we discussed in class, he seems to be one of the only redeemable characters in all of the noir novels we have read. Paul has a proximity to the dark underworld that noir is supposed to let the reader into: he is poor, a drug addict, and lives in an apartment complex in a poor, mostly black area. His whiteness is tainted with a bit of darkness, as he is Jewish, which makes his racial identity slightly ambiguous. Framing this novel from the perspective of Paul creates a distance between the grittiness of noir and the reader. I did not feel the guilt of the voyeur because Paul has already borne the burden of interpreting King David’s story for the reader. . And further, by the end of the novel Paul redeems the reader of feeling the shame of David’s actions by giving his money to help drug addicts. It felt like an anti-drug book with this ending, tying up loose strings in a bow. This perspective of this novel takes away from the shock of an ambiguous ending like If He Hollers Let Him Go, where the wrongdoings that are done to Bob go unpunished. Maybe my definition of noir needs to be expanded, but I think the character of Paul makes Never Die Alone feel lacking in the moral ambiguity of noir.