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My Pafology: Seben
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
Go wanders around some alleys for a while—it doesn’t seem wise to return to his hood yet. He runs into Reynisha, who points a gun at him and threatens to shoot. Go distracts her and steals the gun. Reynisha threatens to tell the police Go has a gun. She hopes they kill him.
Go continues to act recklessly and against his self-interest, stealing a gun from Reynisha. His exaggeratedly poor decision-making capabilities add to the two-dimensionality of his character and reinforces My Pafology’s satirical tone.
Themes
Go takes the gun and walks downtown. He ducks into a store when he sees a police car headed his way down the street. The store is lined with TVs. Images of his appearance on the Snookie Cane Show flash across all the screens. Go leaves the store and wanders the streets until he ends up back at the hood. He heads to the Korean man’s store to get revenge. The man recognizes Go immediately. He reaches down under the front counter to grab something. When the man tries to reach for his shotgun, Go shoots him in the head. Go grabs the money from the register and runs.
Go’s troubles mount as he adds murder and robbery to the list of crimes he has accumulated over the course of My Pafology, adding to the novella’s satirical tone. In the type of novel My Pafology parodies, Go’s reckless behavior would point to how society, in looking down on Go and depriving him of opportunity, has doomed him to this unfortunate fate. But in My Pafology, Monk intends for the melodrama and unbelievability of Go’s actions to strike a dark, satirically humorous tone.
Themes
Go takes shelter in an abandoned building. He falls asleep and dreams that a big white man is making him run laps around the court to try out for the basketball team. He laughs and laughs and tells Go he’s running wrong. Then he makes Go run backward. After a while, Go realizes he has no shoes on and that his feet are bleeding. Willy appears in the dream then. He tells Go he was wrong to say that he and Go “ain’t shit”—“I is shit and so is you,” Willy announces, laughing.
The white man who makes Go run laps and laughs as he struggles is meant to emphasize how the systemic racism of Go’s society sets him up for failure, but the obviousness of the metaphor contributes to My Pafology’s satirical tone, as does Go’s melodramatic final confrontation with Willy the Wonker, his maybe-father. At the same time, Go’s murder of Willy reflects Monk’s genuinely conflicted, confused relationship with his own late father.
Themes
