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My Pafology: Fibe
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
After having breakfast with Mama and Baby Girl the next morning, Go take a bus to Mr. Dalton’s. When he get there, Lois commends him for only being a little late. Today, his job is to wash Mr. Dalton’s cars. While he’s working on one of the cars, someone calls out to him. He turns and sees a young woman in a bikini. She introduces herself as Penelope and explains that she’s Mr. Dalton’s daughter. She goes to Stanford. Penelope asks Go if her dad pays him well, and Go says the pay is fine. Then Penelope asks if Go can drive. Go says yes, and Penelope runs inside to change. She emerges wearing a short, tight dress.
In Monk’s parody on Native Son, Penelope functions as a stand-in for the character Mrs. Dalton. In Wright’s novel, the protagonist Bigger Thomas murders Dalton’s daughter, so things don’t look great for Penelope.
Themes
Penelope orders Go to drive her to a fancy restaurant in Santa Monica. There, they pick up a well-dressed Black man, who introduces himself as Roger. Roger tells Go to drive them to the “hood” so they can eat some chicken and buy some weed. Penelope, laughing with Roger, tells Go to drive to “someplace colorful to eat.” Penelope and Roger’s laughter irritates Go, but he tries to hide it and drives them to a rib place. Roger and Penelope eat their ribs and bemusedly ask Go questions about his life. They crack up when Go says he has four babies with four different women.
Penelope and Roger fill a similar role to the publishers whom Monk hates: they (or at least Penelope) pretend to empathize with the plight of marginalized people of color like Go while simultaneously belittling them, as when Penelope and Roger laugh at Monk’s adhering to the stereotype of the Black man who carelessly fathers children he cannot afford to support.
Themes
After, Go drives Penelope and Roger, who have started drinking out of a flask in the backseat, to pick up weed. On the drive back to Penelope’s, Roger fondles Penelope, who is nearly passed out. Go asks Roger if they get intoxicated like this every day, but Roger doesn’t answer.
Here, the narrative makes an obvious, sweeping point about the double standards applied to marginalized Black people and people of privilege: Roger and Penelope behave as recklessly as Go, yet it affords them lenience it does not extend to Go.
Themes
It’s nearly dark when Go and Penelope arrive back at Mr. Dalton’s. Penelope is still out of it and starts to sing. She tells Go to take her to the pool house. Penelope collapses into a lounge chair, and Go starts to fondle her. A woman calls out for Penelope, and Go freezes, placing a hand over Penelope’s mouth to keep her quiet. But then Go sees the woman’s cane and realizes, relieved, that she’s blind. After the woman leaves, Go spreads Penelope’s legs apart and “stabs her.” She doesn’t wake up.
It's unclear whether Go actually stabs Penelope or whether the narration is using a crude euphemism to describe Go’s act of raping her. Notably, the stabbing imagery in this scene parallels Go’s dream of stabbing Mama in My Pafology’s opening chapter, suggesting that Go has fulfilled a destiny of sorts, becoming the criminal that society has predetermined him to be.
Themes
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