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Chapter 5
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Erasure, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Race and Identity
Familial Obligation vs. Personal Needs
Artistic Integrity vs. Commercial Success
Authenticity
Summary
Analysis
Monk decides to take a leave of absence after the extent of Mother’s mental deterioration becomes clear. He wants her to stay in her home and with Lorraine. He reasons that he’ll only have to stay for a year because by then, Mother will likely be dead. Later, he watches Juanita Mae Jenkins’s appearance on a talk show hosted by Kenya Dunston, who put We’s Lives In Da Ghetto on her Book Club reading list. Kenya gushes about the book. Ms. Jenkins explains that she is from Ohio originally and attended Oberlin for college. She spent a few days with relatives in Harlem, and that’s what inspired the book. She wanted to publish a real, raw book about “our people.” Miss Jenkins confirms that she’s sold the film rights to the book but coyly refuses to say for how much.
Monk’s choice to take a leave of absence represents a shift in his priorities. He has long put his career and his art over family and personal obligations, but now he sets his career aside to care for his declining mother. Perhaps this shift in priorities will help Monk to undertake some of the self-reflect he so desperately needs. The interview with Jenkins points to how inaccuracy of reviewers who have deemed her novel “real” and “raw.” In fact, her background (she attended an elite, private college and didn’t grow up in the impoverished, urban atmosphere about which she writes) suggests great economic privilege.
Themes
Monk, meanwhile, worried about financing Mother’s care, applies for a job in the English Department at American University. Despite Monk’s lengthy CV, the best the chair of the department can offer him is a temporary job lecturing an American Literature survey course in the fall.
The juxtaposition of the previous scene (which describes Jenkins’s immense financial success) with this scene, which emphasizes Monk’s mounting financial woes, lays the foundation for Monk’s bitterness toward the publishing industry and authors like Jenkins who have no qualms about selling out.
Themes
Later, Monk encounters Lorraine in the kitchen. She praises him for moving home to help Mother. After a pause, Monk asks her if she has family in the area and she says no—Monk’s family is the only one she’s known. Monk asks her where she’d go if Mother died, and Lorraine replies that she’d stick around and take care of Monk. Later, Monk and Mother talk about how much they miss Lisa. But moments later, Mother asks if she said something to offend Lisa—she can’t think of another reason why Lisa hasn’t visited her lately.
Monk has returned home to help Mother as her health declines. Notably, Lisa’s recent, unexpected death is what trigger’s Monk’s choice to move home. Although there’s a practical reason for this (Lisa was Mother’s primary helper, and now she’s no longer around to fill that role), it also seems that Lisa’s death has shown Monk that the time he has left with his loved ones can be cut short. Thus, his relocation to D.C. seems motivated, in part, by his desire to reconnect with his mother while he still can. Of course, as this scene shows, Monk may be too late, with Mother’s cognitive function worsening by the day.
Themes
Monk calls Yul sometime later to ask how his latest novel is doing. Yul tells him that three more editors have declined to take it on. “The market simply won’t support this kind of thing,” one of them said. Yul suggests that Monk write another book like Second Failure, an earlier novel of Monk’s about a young Black boy who struggles to understand why the community ostracizes his white mother. Monk hated writing it, but it sold well.
On the one hand, Monk’s refusal to write books that appeal to mass audiences signals his commitment to upholding his artistic integrity. On the other, it perhaps reveals his inability or unwillingness to confront his own complicated feelings toward race and racial identity—and in a broader sense, to lay bare his inner self.
Themes
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Later that night, Monk goes to his father’s old study. He stares at an image of Juanita Mae Jenkins on the cover of Time magazine and thinks about some passages from Native Son and The Color Purple. Then his hands begin to shake, and before he can understand what he’s doing, the words, “Why fo you be axin?” come out of his mouth. Then Monk sits down before his father’s old typewriter and begins to write. He knows he can never put his name on this book. Instead, he writes My Pafology by Stagg R. Leigh.
Monk pens My Pafology, a satire on the so-called “ghetto” literature he so loathes, to work through his frustration over his ongoing financial woes and the repeat rejections he receives from publishing houses. But as the saying goes, all jokes contain at least a kernel of truth. Along these lines, the reader shouldn’t interpret My Pafology as merely a cynical, satirical expression of Monk’s ire at the publishing industry—it must also be considered as a reflection of Monk’s real thoughts and feelings about race, racial identity in America, and his various other interpersonal conflicts.
Themes
