My Pafology Sparknotes

Percival Everett put a 70 page novella called My Pafology into the middle of his novel, Erasure, in order to criticize the authors, audience, and industry of African-American novels. He uses the form of meta-fiction, and tells the story from the perspective of the novel’s protagonist, an author named Thelonious “Monk” Ellison. From the beginning, Monk makes it clear that society is mistaken in its identification of “black life” by telling the reader how much he doesn’t fit in.
“While in college I was a member of the Black Panther Party, defunct as it was, mainly because I felt I had to prove I was black enough. Some people in the society in which I live, described as being black, tell me that I am not black enough. Some people whom the society
This phenomenon occurs to Monk as well, when writing in his journal, he says, “Maybe I have misunderstood my experiments all along, propping up, as if propping up is needed, the artistic traditions I have pretended to challenge” (Everett 156). Monk fails to recognize that his racial cliche will be accepted at face value, and all it does is satiate his readers’ pre-conceived notions of the “energy and savagery of the common black” experience (Everett 254). The irony may be lost on the readers of My Pafology, but the readers of Erasure can see it clearly. Hints, like the lead of My Pafology, Van Go Jenkins, sharing a last name with the author of We’s Lives in Da Ghetto, make Monk’s attempt at satire obvious. However, it is not a surprise to the readers of Erasure that Monk’s critical intent is lost on the readers of My Pafology. Monk explores the transience of language early in the Erasure when he says “Anyone who speaks to members of his family knows that sharing a language does not mean you share the rules governing the use of that language. No matter what is said, something else is meant” (Everett 32). So, despite his failure to see this problem in his
[Wright] was especially horrified at the possibility that his mass white readership might discover deep pleasures in the image of blacks as victims of racism or, more simply, that they might be completely comfortable with the representations of black pain and suffering which inevitably flowed from attempts to deal seriously with the systematic operation of racism in American society” (Gilroy 153 &