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After Clare falls, everyone but Irene ran down to see if Clare was okay in “a frenzied rush of feet down long flights of stairs” (111). “Irene stayed behind” and “remained quite still, staring at a ridiculous Japanese print on the wall” (111). As in the first falling incident, Irene chooses to separate herself from the crowd. Yet, because she is so connected with this later event, she must eventually make her way to the street. While on her way downstairs Irene had to “grasp hold of the banister to save herself from pitching downwards” (113). As in the beginning, Irene almost faints soon after the falling of another. How Irene “managed to make the rest of the journey without fainting she never knew” (113). The questions she asks of herself are these: “what would the others think? That Clare had fallen? That she had deliberately leaned backwards?”(111). She wonders “What if Clare was not dead?”(113). Similarly, in the beginning of the novel, a fainting was surrounded by questions of whether the collapsed man had fainted or was dead. When she reached the street “she came upon the others, surrounded by a little circle of strangers” (113). Like the street scene in the beginning of this novel, Irene is once again part of a huddled crowd around an unconscious body on a city street. If Irene again feels the desire “to turn and rush” away, she is too much a part of this situation to do as she had done before. If, in the first incident, she had almost fainted, Irene was able to avoid this by rushing away “with a quick perception of the need for immediate safety” (13). In the repetition of the incident, of the trauma one might say, Irene almost faints once again, but because she separated herself from the group that ran downstairs, has been able to pull herself together. But although Irene is able to mentally distance herself from the causes of Clare's falling, she is now unable to physically separate herself from the huddled group outside and, losing that sense of "safety" and feeling “her quaking knees gave way under her” she does indeed faint (114). The novel ends in the darkness Irene so fears.
Curiously, what renders the ending of Passing even more
ambiguous is the fact that, as Young notes, “the ending is actually unknowable, because the
original last paragraph disappeared from the first edition’s third printing, and no extant
evidence can explain this change.” The Penguin Classics copy of Passing, cited in this
paper, comes with a note that claims “The text of this edition is based on the first edition,
first printing of Passing” (xxxv). This suggests that the unstable ending paragraph is
intact in this version. Moreover, in the before mentioned note in the Penguin Classics copy of
Passing, it is stated that “there is no indication that Nella Larsen herself recommended,
sought, or approved the excision of the final paragraph”(xxxv). Yet, Mark Madigan claims that
this final paragraph was actually omitted from the third printing in accordance with Larsen’s
instructions, apparently to add ambiguity and suspense to the ending. All that is reinforced
by these contradicting accounts is Young’s statement that Passing is “one of the most
widely read New Negro Renaissance in recent years, but no one really knows how it ends” (632).
But the unstable provenance of the ending paragraph only further
deconstructs the key literary binary of the beginning and the end. Indeed, Young’s “larger
claim” is that Passing “has no ‘definite’ ending, and so any reading should account for
this level of textual instability within its broader response” (639). The consequence of an unstable
and fluid text is that it puts the reader “face to face with questions we cannot answer, and with a
history we cannot write, thus directing them to confront such gaps in the literary past and to
address them openly in the future” (652). In the case of the textual history of Passing what
this means is that the questioning of an uncertain and unstable literary text forces the reader
into a better comprehension of the instability of the related histories of race, sexuality and
class. Young further explains the significance of this “fragile text” by noting how that
fragility produces a dual audience: “the gullible audience becomes those readers who do not
question its textual status, and the knowledgeable audience those who recognize its material
uncertainties” (652). Young goes on to remark, pointedly, that “an inauthentic sense of textual
stability betrays a historical attitude that has not privileged the archival records of writers like
Larsen as worth preserving” (652). In this way, not only are the thematic binaries of
Passing thoroughly interlinked as previously discussed: these oppositions are also inextricable from the other binaries of literary form. This would have to include Passing’s later audience reception, because, as Larsen herself seems to have realized, in order to fully understand the fluid instability of race, sexuality and class, readers must acknowledge the more fundamental fluidity of history itself, and come to some deeper comprehension of a past where an end may, in fact, contain nothing less than its own beginning.
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