In the story Quicksand by Nella Larsen, The protagonist Helga is facing a bunch of issues she never thought she’d have to deal with. She is a twenty-two year old woman that is half black and white. She teaches at Naxos, one of the finest schools for Negroes anywhere in the country. She went in with the intentions of all confidence and joyous thinking Naxos was a community of innovation and individualism but soon came to find out that it was the exact opposite. I believe this is where her character starts to develop. As written in the passage “Helga’s essentially likable and charming personality was smudged out. She had felt this for a long time. Now she faced with determination that other truth which she had refused to formulate in her thoughts, the fact that she was utterly unfitted for teaching, even for mere existence, in Naxos.” (365) She begins to feel like a failure since all of her ideas and teaching methods were constantly being rejected. Helga felt like Naxos was turned into a machine that had students and teachers abiding by the “White” way of how they thought things should be. She began to lose all interest and even hope in teaching anymore. She was slowly loosing it inside by feeling so defeated and disappointed and thought it was time to leave. Helga was so overwhelmed with everything going on she even thought that picking teaching as a career was the wrong choice. Her dreams of going into an all Negro top charted school to help teach and motivate other young beings soon came crashing down. She went into Naxos not accomplishing anything she had set out to do which killed her. I believe Helga did make the right choice by leaving because she was dealing with a lot of interracial and self-acceptance issues that had no good outcome. I’m also anxious to see how the rest of her character develops.

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In the reading Quicksand by Nella Larsen, the main character, Helga Crane, comes to different revelations. Based on her experiences, she develops news ideas about herself. This can be seen early in the story when she decides to no longer teach at the Negro College Naxos. The narrator places her in a setting where she is in her room relaxing from a stressful day of work. As she fails to not think of work and school, she reflects on how she feels working at the college compared to how she felt when she first started. The narrator gives a brief background of when Helga started working. Helga had high regards for the establishment. She wanted to be a part of the Negro education. The author expresses on page 365 “Helga Crane had taught in Naxos for almost two years, at first with the keen joy and zest of those immature people…this zest was blotted out…”. Helga use to be have a passion and joy for teaching at a Negro College until she learned the truth about the establishment. She wasn’t effective of really teaching her students because of the methods of teaching that was used in the school. There was no practice of individualism or expressing thoughts and ideas. Helga thought that this institution was a place to teach black students to conform to the “white” way of thinking. This discovery frustrated her. What made her more unhappy was her inability to assimilate the way the rest of the staff and students did. She was disappointed by how the college ran, insulted by the white preacher’s words to at the assembly, and most of all, angered by the way everything was accepted. It seemed as if no one but her felt that their methods of teaching was wrong, and felt like she was frowned upon because she was the only one who felt this way. All of this drove her to quit teaching there and end the relationships she formed while at the college.

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