Diaspora, Social Protest, and the Unreliable Narrator: Challenging Hierarchies of Race and Class in John Fante’s Ask the Dust

Abstract

Whereas earlier readers of John Fante’s Ask the Dust interrogated how Fante’s Italian American narrator navigates the space between assimilation and cultural identification, more recent critics have examined how narrator Arturo Bandini demonstrates complicity with racist ideology in his prejudice against other diasporic communities in Los Angeles. This article builds on that development, exploring how Fante’s novel invites readers to critique both class hierarchy and white supremacist logic—particularly racist depictions of Chicana/o culture—through its narrator’s negative example. I argue that Fante makes his narrator intermittently aware of his own missteps, using him periodically as a voice for anti-racist and anti-classist discourse, while also undercutting his racial and class prejudices by painting him as egotistical, self-delusional, and therefore unreliable. In addition, I reveal that Ask the Dust develops the character of its Chicana protagonist in ways that contradict the narrator’s fetishism, while also making her his clearer-seeing counterpoint in matters of class, thereby presenting a positive alternative to his approach. In this way, I argue, the intersecting diasporic trajectories of Ask the Dust’s Italian American and Chicana characters ultimately encourage readers to resist racial and class oppression, while also representing the difficulty and the necessity of cross-cultural social resistance and solidarity.