1. Whose story is this? Clare's or Irene's?

2. How reliable is Irene as a narrator? Do you trust her point of view more or less than Nick's? Why?

2. The metaphor of passing has several layers of meaning. What are they? How do they relate to each other?

4. It has been suggested that Passing uses race more as a device to sustain suspense than as a compelling social issue. What is the relation of race to subjective experience in the text?

5. What does this passage mean: "[Irene] was caught between two allegiances, different, yet the same. Herself. Her race. Race: The thing that bound and suffocated her. Whatever steps she took, or if she took none at all, something would be crushed. A person or the race. Clare, herself, or the race. Or, it might be all three."

6. Characters do a lot of looking in Passing. How do the relations of looking (ie: who is looking at whom, how it makes the seer and seen feel, what can be seen, what we as the readers see) create tension and social hierarchy? How does the "gaze" in Passing compare with the gaze in Gatsby, in modernist art, film, and in advertising?

7. POINTS OF COMPARISON WITH THE GREAT GATSBY
narrator
role of the past
identity & persona: on what are they based?
elitism
secrets
money and materialism
parties
passing
style & fashion
judgements based on superficial/visual
inventing & reinventing the self
narrative structure & chronology

8) How does Larsen participate in and make a contribution to modernism? How does she treat some of the characteristic preoccupations of modernism:

self-conscious questioning of all social and moral values
"Make it new!"
interest in perception
determination to work creatively with fragmentation (from Cubism to montage)
self-conscious manipulation of the conventions of art itself
themes of alienation and incompleteness
fascination with time and space
dealing with the consequences of World War I
modernist metaphors (Pound's "Petals on a wet, black bough")

9) How does Larsen reflect and shape some of the concerns of the Jazz Age? Here are some topics to think about as you bring Larsen's novel into dialogue with the films, advertising, art, music, and other cultural expressions of the Jazz Age:

portraits - women's independence - commodification - the gaze - the city & "modern life" - foreground & background - tension between nostalgia & progress - landscape - interior & exterior - attention to details ("so much depends upon a red wheel barrow"–Williams) - tension between holding a romantic ideal & a modern cynicism - duplicity of modern life ("life is a cheating life") - tension between accurate representation of reality & modernist distortion - subjectivity & objectivity - modern sense of self & identity - fascination for upper class - racial fascinations