Performative Gender within NW

Zadie Smith’s NW experimental and fragmented form interplays with the idea of meaning throughout the text. As a reader, it is hard not to draw upon comparisons to the self when reading NW. The act of reading NW, then, becomes a performance in which I, as a reader, engage in exploring meaning deeper and see how the text resonates with me. This essay explores gender as a performance of the active reading experience and one that resonates with the reader. Gender takes on the shape of a liquid identity throughout NW, and it is one that adds meaning to the form of NW, in that, gender comes to perform itself in adding meaning to liquid identities throughout the performance of reading NW. Gender comes to take on multiple meanings throughout NW, and it is one that the author explores further in this paper.