Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Sellout, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Progress vs. Regress
Blackness, Origins, and Home
Stereotypes and Absurdity
Criminality, Authority, and the Law
Gender, Sex, and Hypersexualization
Summary
Analysis
The narrator’s “Welcome Home” party may well have turned into a going-to-jail party. He arrives home to find everyone in his den, watching Little Rascals movies with Hominy. Foy was cleared of attempted murder on grounds of insanity, but the narrator won the civil suit against him. Foy was forced to sell his possessions in order to pay his lawyer’s fees, but the narrator was able to take the only thing he wanted in the first place—the Little Rascals movies. While they watch the long series of racist movies, King Cuz says it’s no surprise Foy went insane, and Stevie comments that Hominy deserves a lifetime achievement award at the Oscars.
The narrator’s “Welcome Home” party not only welcomes him back to his house and to Dickens, but also to his childhood. At this point, it appears as if time has reversed and plunged the narrator back into his happy memories of watching the Little Rascals movies with Hominy and the other neighborhood kids. The novel’s happy ending is thus a scene of reversal—a final challenge to ideas about linear progress.
Themes
The narrator goes outside to cuddle his animals. Hominy joins him and tells him that he’s quitting slavery, adding: “We’ll talk reparations in the morning.” Marpessa calls the narrator inside, and he finds both her and Charisma lying on the bed. The TV is on, playing the weather. The announcer includes Dickens in the forecast. Marpessa laughs “maniacally,” and the narrator bursts into tears over the fact that “Dickens is back on the map.”
This passage establishes a connection between the narrator achieving his goals of bringing back Dickens and winning over Marpessa and Hominy’s decision to quit slavery. Perhaps now that the narrator has fulfilled his deepest desires, his and Hominy’s dynamic of mutual wish-fulfilment must end. The idea of Hominy’s reparations—that is, payment to former slaves, or the descendants of slaves—is another darkly comic nod to issues that still plague American society today.
Themes
