Crushing the Façade

Most characters in books are usually simple and flat. By this I mean that they can easily be described in a few words. Hermione Granger is an intelligent girl, Dick Hickock is a cold-blooded pedophile, Blaire Waldorf is a spoiled rich girl, etc. There might be a bit more to them, but not much. That's basically it. Never before had I been faced with a character as complex as Macon Dead.

Initially, Macon Dead is portrayed as greedy man who only cares about his wealth, and everything else - including his family - is irrelevant. The narrator even explains in a detached tone that "he still wished he had strangled [his wife] back in 1921." (63) This fits so perfectly the image the reader has of Macon Dead that it comes as no surprise.

However, when Macon Dead beats his wife after she tells a short anecdote, the audience is most certainly taken aback. And afterwards, when Milkman hits his father to defend his mom, the reader supports him - or at least I did. However, I was in no way expecting what comes next: After Milkman retires to his room, his dad comes in and opens up in an extremely unexpected way. He ends up confiding in his son the hardships of his marital life and confessing that he has a feeling that Ruth and her father had a sexual relationship. It is then that I realized that there is a lot more to Macon Dead than the greed he shows to the rest of the world. It might be his greed what created these new feelings or it might have been these feelings that created a façade and masked him with greed.

However, I guess we shall never know whether Ruth actually had something going on with her dad. Macon began suspecting so after she refused to support him and convince her father to lend him money. Yet, this might as well have been a harsh and erroneous conclusion. But then again, Morrison has already implied such behaviors when the narrator tells about how Ruth forced her dad to give her a goodnight peck every night (although he felt uncomfortable) and how she breast-fed Milkman prior to him surpassing infancy - and thus he earned the nickname. I guess we'll never know the absolute truth... if there even is one.