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
Johnny Fontane and Nino Valenti are in a garish Las Vegas hotel suite. Nino is playing blackjack. He is now fully drunk and eager to gamble, and he is having a major winning streak. Johnny brushes off the calculated advances of a beautiful cocktail waitress while he watches Nino get drunker and continue to gamble. Nino eventually passes out and several casino workers carry him to his room and put him to bed. A concerned Johnny calls Jules Segal to check on Nino.
In this passage, Puzo suggests that the fantasies of wealth and glamor that Las Vegas promises dangerously shallow. Johnny and Nino are now jaded veterans of Las Vegas’s illusions of happiness, and they are even more miserable for it. For Nino, the emptiness of Las Vegas’s shallow fantasies only enables his already deadly addition to alcohol. Meanwhile, even the normally sex-addicted Johnny is repulsed by the cocktail waitresses’ deliberate seduction act that is geared towards making him spend more money in the casino.
Themes
Jules thanks Johnny for the check he sent, then explains that Nino has adult stabile diabetes and seems “firmly determined to drink himself to death.” He recommends that Nino be committed to a psychiatric ward, which shocks Johnny. Soon, Lucy Mancini arrives and Nino wakes up, clamoring for another drink. Jules advises against it, but Johnny gives him a glass of whiskey. After drinking it, Nino has a severe reaction that Jules quells with a needle to Nino’s neck.
Johnny’s shock over Jules’s recommendation that Nino be institutionalized may stem from his assumption that emotional weakness conflicts with “real” masculinity. Johnny prefers that Nino tough it out rather than admit that he has a life-threatening mental illness. Johnny thrives in a culture that equates “masculinity” with unflinching displays of strength and the suppression of “feminine” feelings. This is, of course, hypocritical of Johnny, who appeared before Don Corleone earlier in the novel in a state of emotional wreckage. The Don’s instance that Johnny act “LIKE A MAN” only further cements Johnny’s belief that men do not show their feelings.
Themes
Johnny knows that Jules expected the reaction, and Jules admits as much to show the severity of Nino’s alcoholism. While he considers having Nino committed, Johnny asks Jules why he became an abortionist. “He wanted to help girls in trouble, girls who might commit suicide or do something dangerous to get rid of the baby,” Lucy says. Jules adds that he grew tired of working hard to save people who had terminal diseases or who did not want to be saved. Abortions, Jules says, “are nice and easy, everybody happy, like washing the dishes and leaving a clean sink.”
Puzo uses Jules’s career as an abortionist to comment on the hypocritical nature of how people approach healthcare. They refuse to do simple things like stop drinking, even though such simple acts will save their lives. Yet abortion is illegal because people make the disingenuous claim that they do not want abortions. By merely resigning himself to performing the procedures people want, and refraining from telling them what they need, Jules absolves himself of further responsibility for his patients’ fate.
Themes
Johnny tells them that Michael Corleone and Tom Hagen are arriving in Las Vegas. Lucy says she and Jules are having dinner with Michael, Tom, and Fredo tomorrow, and that Michael got his face fixed after consulting with Jules. Nino wakes up again and Johnny tries to console him. Jules orders him a nurse, but he knows Nino is on borrowed time.
Nino’s indifference towards his own life renders moot all of Johnny’s efforts to turn him into a star in order to curry favor with Don Corleone. By introducing Nino in his debauched Hollywood world, Johnny has essentially condemned him to die in a manner befitting a mob boss’s godson.
Themes
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The narrative flashes back to a year earlier. Johnny Fontane is depressed despite producing a successful movie starring himself and Nino. Having undergone surgery to have the warts removed from his vocal cords, Johnny wants to sing but is afraid to try and risk permanently damaging his voice. Jules Segal tells him to try, but the results are “hoarse and lousy,” causing Johnny to give up. Singing is “the only thing he really knew,” and the thought of never singing again terrifies him. He spends the weekend with Virginia and the kids but becomes irritated when Virginia indicates jealousy over his revived career.
Johnny’s depression over the potential loss of his voice suggests that singing is the real source of his identity—“the only thing he really knew.” To ease the insecurity he feels over his vice, Johnny resorts to womanizing as a form of self-medication and distraction. Virginia knows Johnny better than he knows himself, and she expresses jealousy when the source of his insecurity has the potential to disappear.
Themes
Fontane leave’s Virginia’s house and invites Nino and two girls for a weekend at his Palm Springs house. As Nino and his girl fool around upstairs, Johnny begins humming along to his piano while his date, makes a drink. He starts singing an old standard of his. Much to his surprise, there is no pain in his throat, and his voice carries just as it used to. Johnny immediately arranges for a band, and he and Nino practice like in the old days. His voice is richer and more mature now, “nothing less than masterful.”
Johnny’s ability to sing again reveals the shallowness of the womanizing existence he has led for so long. Despite having a beautiful young girl at his disposal, the joy he finds singing again cause him to ignore her completely. Unlike Nino, who never overcomes his penchant for drinking to self-medicate, Johnny rediscovers his purpose in life. Meanwhile, the success of Jules procedure hints at the value of true expertise—a kind of expertise that stands in contrast to that of the doctors in Sicily, where the identification of expertise has been corrupted by the mafia.
Themes
The next morning, Johnny wakes up to a fully restored voice, but Nino is either dead or asleep as a nurse wheels in his medication. Johnny realizes that Nino “didn’t care enough about anything to make him want to stay alive.”
Nino, much like Luca Brasi, embraces a nihilistic existence. Both men ultimately succumb to their own inner demons: Nino to alcohol, Brasi to his sociopathic heart.
Themes
