The Native Speaker, written by Chang-Rae Lee is a very interesting book that we read this semester. The main character, Henry Park, provides a certain amount of mystery and curiosity to the novel. His profession, which we don’t know from the start, we learn later on in the book, being a spy, is an incredibly mysterious thing, even so he had to hide it from his wife for a while. I thought that this type of character really added to what we were reading. While I have definitely come to enjoy other books and characters that we have read, I am having a hard time in comparing him to any other character that we have been introduced to. I find there to be a really interesting connection between Henry and Gatsby. Gatsby was considered to be very mysterious to everyone in town because they didn’t know him. But once Nick gets to know Gatsby, all the mysterious and questions, in a sense, went away. With Henry, it’s the opposite. At first he seems like an average, normal man. But to those closest to him, like his wife Lelia, he is more secretive than to a random person. Lelia didn’t know that he was a spy from the beginning, she had to find out later. I think it’s really interesting how opposite Gatsby and Henry are. Also, Henry kind of reminded me of the narrator from The Invisible Man. It’s hard to even provide a certain situation or anything that specifically happened to make me link these two men, but the mystery factor definitely plays a big part in comparing these two men.
