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Chapter 1
Themes
and Colors
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
The next morning, Monk grabs breakfast at the B&B before heading over to the conference at the Mayflower. He feels totally indifferent about the whole thing and wonders why he even came. Still, he’s a bit nervous: he knows the excerpt from his novel will upset some people. The first paper is fairly straightforward, if boring. When it’s Monk’s turn, the audience greets him with “a certain clearing of throats and not-quite-muttering.” He takes the stage and proceeds to read:
Monk’s nervousness shows that despite his obstinate, jaded attitude toward the publishing industry, he still cares a great deal about his work and wants to come off well. The audience’s “clearing of throats and not-quite-muttering” hints at their general dislike of (or perhaps impatience toward) Monk and his work.
Active
Themes
F/V: Placing the Experimental Novel. F/V: a novel excerpt. The narration segues into the excerpt Monk reads aloud at the conference. F/V opens with the premise that the work’s title “answers any question before it is raised,” but then, in contradiction, suggests that perhaps the mere fact of its being a title is a “suggestion of negation.” The narration continues on in this intentionally opaque and convoluted manner, focusing on Barthes’s critical work S/Z, which it analyzes in the same, poststructuralist style in which Barthes analyzes Balzac’s Sarrasine in that critical work. The excerpt focuses on narrative and representation, and how adequately (or inadequately) language is able to recreate the essence of what it purports to represent.
In both style and substance, Monk’s novel is exaggeratedly, humorously opaque and confusing. While it’s possible this is genuinely how he prefers to write, one can’t help but note a forced, insincere quality in Monk’s writing—there is nothing personal about it. Indeed, it resists the personal in favor of the detached, the technical. Perhaps, then, Monk’s writing does reveal something true about Monk the writer, albeit indirectly: he is extremely guarded against the outside world and prefers not to let others get to know him. At the same time, the subject of his novel—on narrative and representation—outlines some of the themes Erasure will explore, such as the potential and limitations of narrative to represent and communicate truth fully and authentically.
Active
Themes
Monk finishes reading, and the audience responds with tepid applause. Davis Gimbel, the editor of the journal Frigid Noir, stands up and shouts obscenities at Monk. Monk senses that the man didn’t understand a word of what Monk just read and calls out that he didn’t mean to hurt Gimbel’s feelings. Gimbel declares Monk a “mimetic hack.”
Active
Themes
