Basically Living in an Asylum

     So, I think it's pretty obvious now that Milkman thinks anybody who does something a little bit abnormal is crazy. It's the first thing out of his mouth and he seems to keep that opinion for quite a while. Macon Dead II tells him all about his mother. She's crazy. He goes to meet Pilate and she's crazy too. Now Hagar is trying to kill him and she's understandably crazy to him. Then Guitar spills on the Seven Days and he is also crazy. All of these people can definitely seem crazy, but Magdalene called Lena? Yeah, not so much. Each 'crazy' person has their story time in the book. The 'Milkman, sit down and let me tell you something about...' is a familiar dynamic by now. Each person has their own set of logic that sets puts everything in an even more skewed light most of the time, but Lena's argument seems the most sound.

     In class, we talked about how lots of people seem to have difficulty expressing love, and that's why they can seem crazy. Lena, however, lays out a perfectly logical argument. It doesn't even seem like she's throwing a huge bias into it, or that her logic is all that twisted. In fact, I totally agree with her. Now for many of the other 'story times' Milkman wasn't particularly polite or respectful. He made all sorts of assumptions and started seeing the worst in other people, most notably Ruth. Now Lena sets out a nicely wrapped argument, trying to explain that he's been 'pissing' all over the women in the house his entire life. She basically says he wants the power and the attention but none of the responsibility his father has. In fact, it seems to me like Milkman has been explicitly avoiding responsibility. He doesn't want the responsibility of buying Hagar another gift, and he doesn't really want to go talk out their relationship with her, so he just writes a letter. It's not all that thought out and he has a marked disrespect for Hagar and her feelings.

     With all these stories coming out slowly over the course of the book and Milkman's reactions to them, it seems like he sees the worst in everybody. Then, that 'worst' that he found, seems to be exactly how the characters seem. Morrison just sets all of the action and the pacing up so that we can see that Milkman has a point in calling two thirds of the characters crazy, but it's starting to seem like Milkman might just bring all that out in people.

     When he goes on his trip to Pennsylvania, everyone seems so nice and polite and pretty accommodating for the son of Macon Dead II. Milkman even starts acting more like his dad, engaging in pleasantries that even he has never noticed himself use before. The one time he isn't acting like himself, everybody seems so nice. The rest of the time, the characters are all mysterious and vague.

     There's some form of 'be careful what you wish for' that ought to apply here, but Milkman's protagonist status really throws an interesting light on everybody else. If this was Ruth's story, we would know everything about her from her point of view and she'd probably make Macon Dead II out to be a horrible person. Milkman's just in the middle, but he still judges. Now it's up to him what he's going to do with all this information, and what to do about the gold.