Through analysis of the novels of racial passing by six early twentieth-century authors – William Faulkner, Nella Larsen, James Weldon Johnson, Walter Francis White, Jessie Redmon Fauset, and Fannie Hurst – this essay explores how whiteness as unmarked norm at once facilitates passing in modern America and complicates narrative representation of it, and how literary modernism informs the authors’ negotiations with the complication. In doing so, the essay focuses on the paradoxical operation of the passer’s “Black-passing-for-white” identity. For, while enabling plot development and dramatization in accordance with passing fiction’s genre conventions, this identity framework inevitably suppresses passing’s unmarked working by making it narratively visible to the reader. The essay demonstrates that the modernist attentiveness to subjectivity – applied to varying degrees of experimentation, from fragmented interior monologue to third-person limited narration – helps the novels to reenact the invisible passing as well as resist essentializing the Black-passing-for-white identity around which their stories revolve.