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Tom Wahzetepe is a character in one of Monk’s short stories. In the story, he is invited to compete on a trivia game show alongside Hal Dullard, a white man from Indiana who is portrayed as being a good father and an upstanding member of his community. The game show is obviously rigged—while the host, Jack Spades, selects impossibly difficult questions for Tom to answer, he asks Dullard ridiculously easy ones. Despite Tom’s humble background and lack of a formal education, he answers all his questions correctly and is deemed the show’s winner—much to the anger and shock of Spades and the audience.
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Tom Wahzetepe Character Timeline in Erasure
The timeline below shows where the character Tom Wahzetepe appears in Erasure. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 10
...short story he’s written, titled “Àppropos de bottes.” The story follows a Black man named Tom who shows up at the NBC building to fill out an application to be on...
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Eventually, a producer named Damien Blanc approaches Tom and tells him he did very well on the test and asks if Tom would...
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Later, Tom takes his place onstage alongside his competitor, a white man from Indiana named Hal Dullard....
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...Spades posing painfully easy questions to Dullard, who confidently and unwittingly responds with incorrect answers. Tom, meanwhile, continues to answer his own increasingly difficult, specific questions correctly and in great detail....
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