The Sellout: City Lites: An Interlude Summary & Analysis

The narrator has always been fascinated by sister cities. Cities sometimes become sisters as a sign of reconciliation, sometimes in a kind of “shotgun wedding,” and sometimes to deliberately “piss off their mother countries.” Cities that have a hard time finding their “soul mate” use a matchmaking service called Sister City Global. Two days after Hominy’s birthday, a City Match Consultant from the company named Susan Silverman calls the narrator and tells him they couldn’t find Dickens on the map. When the narrator explains the situation, she says it doesn’t matter, and that they will still find Dickens a match.

Susan tells the narrator that Dickens’ three most compatible cities are Juárez, Chernobyl, and Kinshasa. The narrator is confused because Chernobyl isn’t even a city, but nonetheless enthusiastically accepts all three. Susan replies that sadly they have all rejected Dickens—Juárez because Dickens is too violent, Chernobyl because of the city’s pollution, and Kinshasa because Dickens is “too black.” The narrator is too embarrassed to tell Hominy about his failure, so he lies to make it seem like Dickens is still getting a sister city.

Hominy is so disappointed that he attempts to sell himself, standing on an auction block in the narrator’s driveway for a week. The narrator attempts to get him to move by warning him that Frederick Douglass or a group of Quaker abolitionists are on the way, but Hominy stays in place. He declares that he refuses to work for a master “who can’t manage a simple task such as finding a sister city.” The narrator points out that Hominy doesn’t do any work for him anyway.

In the end the narrator decides to match Dickens with three cities that also “disappeared under dubious circumstances.” The first is Thebes, the set from a 1923 silent movie. The second is Döllersheim, Austria, which was the birthplace of Hitler’s grandfather. Hitler bombed it into oblivion in an effort to disguise his own Jewish roots. After much competition from various contenders, the narrator names the Lost City of White Male Privilege as Dickens’ final sister city. Many people deny that this city exists, while others blame the city for its own disappearance. The narrator assures the city that it has an alliance in Dickens, “the Last Bastion of Blackness.”