Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Godfather, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Crime and Justice
Power
Masculinity and Patriarchy
Family
Loyalty and Betrayal
Summary
Analysis
Kay Adams peers out of her bedroom window from her home in small-town New Hampshire. She sees two burly men emerge from their car and knock at her door. When she answers, the men identify themselves as Detective John Phillips and Detective Siriani from the New York police department. They enter and begin questioning Kay about Michael Corleone and his possible connection to the murders of Sollozzo and McCluskey. Kay’s father, Mr. Adams, also greets the detectives. Kay insists, “Mike wouldn’t do anything like that […] he never had anything to do with his family.”
Puzo emphasizes how Kay now lives in a different world from Michael. When separated from his family at Dartmouth, Michael was able to connect with Kay as a person who wanted to strike out on his own rather than accept his predetermined fate within his family. Having not been with Michael since the murders of Sollozzo and McCluskey, however, Kay still believes that Michael has maintained that distance from his family, and she still believes him incapable of the kind of horrible deeds that she knows his family engages in.
Themes
The detectives lay out the circumstantial evidence that ties Michael to the murders, including his argument with Captain McCluskey outside of the hospital and several anonymous informers who have fingered Mike for the crime. Kay, however, remains convinced that Michael is innocent. After the detectives leave, Mr. and Mrs. Adams reveal they have been opening Kay’s mail and are well aware of her affair with Michael.
Kay’s refusal to believe that Michael is capable of murder is understandable given the context of their relationship up to this point. Her parents, however, display more suspicion about him even if they are unaware of the nature of his “Family business.”
Themes
Three days after her meeting with the detectives, Kay visits the Corleone mall in Long Beach. There, she meets Tom Hagen and inquires about Michael’s whereabouts. “We know he’s all right but we don’t know where he is right now,” Tom tells her. He confirms the detectives’ story about McCluskey breaking Michael’s jaw but denies any link between her fiancé and the murders. “Mike was never a vindictive man,” he says. “I’m sure that had nothing to do with what happened.”
Tom responds to Kay not as a potential family member, but as a lawyer. He speaks in a formal, straightforward manner with minimal sympathy for Kay’s loss of Michael. That he must lie to Kay about the true nature of Michael’s involvement in the murders understates what Michael will himself say to her later: she cannot have any knowledge about his “business.”
Themes
Kay asks him to deliver a letter to Michael, but Tom refuses, claiming that doing so would implicate him as having knowledge of Michael’s whereabouts. Before leaving the mall, Kay greets Mama Corleone. She offers Kay coffee and tells her that Don Corleone and Michael are fine but does not reveal where Michael is hiding. She advises Kay to “forget about Mikey,” and as two men drive Kay home, she wrestles with the unavoidable reality that “the young man she had loved was a cold-blooded murderer.”
Mama Corleone’s interactions with Kay foreshadow the kind of existence Kay will have once she marries into the Corleone Family. Like Mama Corleone, she will almost exclusively tend to domestic duties in a sphere separate from that of the men who run their Mafia world. Mama Corleone advises Kay to forget her love for Michael because she knows that crime Family always trumps traditional family.
Themes
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