Percival Everett writes Erasure with an incredibly avant-garde structure for a fiction novel. The main narrative is actually a frame story into which a plethora of writings from a myriad of genres are skillfully integrated. The work features a brooding African-American protagonist named Thelonius Ellison, nicknamed Monk, and serves as his adult diary or diary. The main entries advance the plot while providing insight into how Monk became the man he currently is, but the journal is riddled with asides and short entries of creative writing ideas (presumably for use in later stories, but not written or just for fun) and concise observations. The journal suggests that Monk has crafted an identity in life that is unaffected by race, but the plot brings him to a common but rarely depicted conflict between man and race that forces him to struggle with his identity as author; this conflict speaks to the powerful social forces that white society inherently imposes on it and how these forces impinge on black people's ability to self-identify, amplifying the conflict through the lens of a profession. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essayMonk is a literature professor and linguist in a family of upper-class black doctors. His diary opens with a melancholy explanation of himself which describes it as "unfortunate" that he does not have the will to commit suicide, if only to be able to guarantee that he leaves no work unfinished that the people could find and read after his death. Monk says at the beginning of the novel: “The hard truth is that I almost never think about race. The times when I thought about it a lot, I did it because of my guilt for not thinking about it” (Everett 2). He goes on to say that he doesn't even believe in race, and he explains by stating that he thinks there are those who would treat him unfairly because they believe in race; essentially, it alludes to the perspective that race is simply a social construct that does not necessarily have to be perceived but is and, therefore, causes people to perceive and treat each other in a certain way. Monk thus moves on to discuss his career as an author. so far, and his entries describe events that illustrate to the reader how race is an insurmountable obstacle that refuses to let him ignore it in both his social and professional lives. For example, he joined the then-defunct Black Panther Party in college for no other reason than to try to embrace his blackness, probably before his probably conscious decision to no longer recognize the race. As an author, he publishes academic novels such as reimaginings of plays by Euripides or parodies of French poststructuralist works. He excerpts a review of one such work in his journal to illustrate the type of reception his works receive, and in essence, he calls his work, his characters, his language, and his subtle revision of the plot commendable, " but we are at a loss to understand what this recasting of Aeschylus's Persians has to do with the African-American experience. » One of the elegant nuances of Everett's writings is shown in the way Monk's journal entries convey only the most superficial and fleeting dissatisfaction with the way racial prejudice affected him while there is still enough substance. for the reader to glean a greater, underlying resentment that even Monk may not yet realize in himself during the early parts of the novel. His anguish in the face ofsuch things seem buried only to come to a head following events that occur in the middle chapters. A black author named Juanita Mae Jenkins published a book called We's Lives in Da Ghetto, and the novel was praised by critics as an intensely realistic portrait of the black experience. Monk deplores the praise Jenkins' novel receives, but even more, he hates the way his publisher reacts, trying to push him in the same direction to drive his sales. Of course, it's not the first time, but Marilyn, an author he somewhat respects as a writer and as a woman he knows he doesn't like, is finally starting to act again. love after breaking up with her boyfriend, and Monk stops when he sees Jenkins' book on the nightstand. Monk's reaction to We's Lives in Da Ghetto and, in particular, the positive reception it received from white America, was such that he was forced to acknowledge race because of his anger at what she represents. speaks to the true African American experience. It is indisputable that he is a black man, but he is repeatedly denied his chosen identity because white America does not accept his identity as an authentic black man. Importantly, this makes him so angry that it hinders his ability to have sex even after he looks forward to sleeping with Marilyn. The psychological impact manifests itself psychosomatically with what could be considered, to some extent, erectile dysfunction, all because the man he has chosen to be is the man society tells him is unworkable. He considers Jenkins' work to simply exploit blackness to produce a commodity for the market, as opposed to legitimate art. The most important facet of Monk's reaction to Jenkins' work comes from the next book Monk writes - a story within a story in which the entire work is written in Erasure. Monk wrote a novel called My Pafology, which he later renamed even more crudely Fuck. The book is little more than an oversimplification of Richard Wright's Native Son. He published it under the pseudonym Stagg R. Leigh, drawing on the name from 19th-century African-American folklore of a black man named Stagger Lee who killed a white man on Christmas for a robbery he claimed had lacked respect. man. Because Stagger Lee and Bigger Thomas, the protagonist of Native Son, are both representations of black men who have a superficial definition of manhood and who both murder white people, Monk uses them to create his own superficial black archetype. Monk claims in his diary that he does not want this novel to succeed, but rather proof that the world knows better, that white America is simply exploiting an image of blackness that is not. In this attempt, he makes Wright's work much less meaningful, stripping it of its nuances to satirize white people's fixation on false representations of blackness. His agent, Yul, is more than reluctant to publish Fuck when Monk first discusses it with him, because he feels that even the publishing houses that produce the works that offended Monk will not publish Fuck because they are offended by what he says about Jenkins' work. and all the others. Ultimately, the false image of blackness becomes superimposed on Monk's identity through Stagg R. Leigh. Yul informs him that Random House has agreed to publish Fuck. This comes after Monk, in the same chapter, spoke out against the idea of ​​sending the book with qualifiers explaining that it is a parody because the greatest offense the industry could give him to inflict is to not realize it without such a qualifier. As they do not.