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My Pafology: Sex
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
Baby Girl wakes Go up the next morning and excitedly tells him that Snookie Cane is on the phone and wants him to appear on the Snookie Cane Show. Go thinks it’s a joke at first, but then he picks up the phone and finds that it’s actually Snookie Cane. She says that a guest on the show has a crush on him and wants to surprise him. They’re taping a show today at 1:00 p.m.—can Go make it? Go says yes. Baby Girl catches Mama up to speed, and then the three of them catch a ride to the studio with their neighbor Quanita-Mack.
The phone call from Snookie Cane seems out of the blue and rather odd. But Go, who repeatedly acts selfishly in pursuit of his own self-interest, doesn’t seem to find anything suspicious about it. Go’s seeming naivety about the ordeal adds to Monk’s satirical criticism of the two-dimensional characters featured in works of urban fiction.
Themes
Go, Mama, Baby Girl, and Quanita-Mack arrive at the studio. A producer named Gloria leads him backstage to a gay Black man (Go uses two slurs to describe him) to get him touched up for the camera. When Go is ready, Gloria instructs him to wait for a red light for his cue to walk on stage. When the light flashes, Go walks onstage—and comes face to face with his “fo’ babies sittin on they fo’ mamas’ laps”—Aspireene on Sharinda’s; Tylenola on Reynisha’s; Dexatrina on Robertarina’s; and Rexall on Cleona’s. The audience boos Go as he walks across the stage.
The homophobic language Go uses to describe the gay makeup artist mirrors Monk’s judgmental attitude toward Bill’s new openness about his homosexuality. Once more, the inner conflicts Monk can’t bring himself to reflect on directly seep into the narration of My Pafology, suggesting the bitterness or perhaps jealousy he feels toward Bill’s courage to be his authentic self.
Themes
Snookie Cane stands in the middle of the audience and smugly welcomes Go. She tells him the name of today’s show: “You gave me the baby, Now where’s the money.” Go claims to have paid the women child support, but they all call him a liar. He swears at them, using derogatory language. The audience boos at his belligerent attempts to justify his actions. One man in the audience suggests that Go has low self-esteem about his manhood.
As the reader may have anticipated, the story about a secret admirer was merely a setup to orchestrate Go’s ambush by the four women with whom he has fathered children. Go’s unapologetic lies about making child support payments draw from negative stereotypes about Black men who father children they can’t afford to support.
Themes
Go looks into the audience and sees Mama sitting in the front row. She starts to cry. Snookie Cane notices and asks Mama who she is. Between sniffles, Mama tells the audience that she’s Go’s mom and that she didn’t raise him to act this way. A white man in the audience interjects to say that Go can’t treat the women on stage with respect because he doesn’t even respect his own mother.
This scene adds to the melodrama of My Pafology, with Go continuing to disregard the emotions and general wellbeing of the people who care for him most. Go’s shameful indifference to Mama’s tears reinforces his poor character. This adds to Monk’s satirical criticism of the low bar to which audiences hold the two-dimensional characters in novels like what My Pafology satirizes.
Themes
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Just then, Snookie Cane turns to Go and tells him they have another surprise for him. She asks if he knows who Penelope Dalton is—and then two police officers come through the door and make their way toward Go. Snookie informs the audience that Go raped Penelope last night. Go springs out of his chair and runs through the audience. A gay man in the audience who’s been heckling Go tries to stop Go, but Go knees him, and the man collapses. Go runs out of the building.
This scene confirms that Go raped but did not kill Penelope, a key difference between My Pafology and Richard Wright’s Native Son, the novel whose plot My Pafology most closely parodies. In that novel, the protagonist (Bigger Thompson) kills Mr. Dalton’s daughter, Mary Dalton.
Themes
