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My Pafology: Won
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 heads to the pool hall to meet up with his friends Yellow and Tito. They get into a fight with some other guys, and one pulls a gun on Go. After the men leave, Go remarks that he has to get a gun. The first thing he’ll do with it is rob the Korean man at the plaza who always looks at Go like he’s going to rob him. Yellow calls Van Go “crazy.” To this, Van Go simply explains, “Gots to be crazy to survive.” They start insulting one another’s mamas.
Adding yet another negative stereotype to the mix, this scene shows Go’s lack of ambition, his vengefulness, and his propensity toward violence. Go’s line, “Gots to be crazy to survive,” is melodramatic and “deep” to an exaggerated, comic degree, poking fun at the sort of “raw,” “real” writing for which Juanita Mae Jenkins’s We’s Lives in Da Ghetto has been praised.
Themes
On his walk home later, Go approaches an attractive Black woman stepping out of a red Mustang. When she sees him, she jolts up and points a can of pepper spray at him. He calls her “baby doll,” and she tells him to buzz off. “Kindly move along,” says the woman. Go mocks her for the stuffy language and accuses her of being “uppity.” He watches her drive off and wants to scream.
Go’s misogyny and disdain for the woman’s “uppity” way of speaking and apparent wealth further establishes him as a bitter, unlikeable character. Again, Monk is playing up traits typically seen in characters of urban fiction to satirize the genre, showing how it is (in Monk’s eye) insulting and derogatory to Black people, as are people who consume and praise such literature.
Themes
