Friday, December 9, 2011
Opinions on Macon Dead II
With the new information of Macon being a responsible and "self-made" man, I was thinking about how my opinion of the character has changed. Once you consider the necessity for his drive towards wealth, all of his following actions can be viewed as simply Macon attempting to do what he's always done. Even still, I'm having trouble forgiving all of Macon's actions, especially when it comes to his gruff and unloving persona he displays for his family. I don't feel like we've discussed Macon II enough in class, and I mainly wrote this post so that I could hear a wider variety of opinions. So what do you guys think of Macon's intentions? Are they justified because of the conditions in which he was raised? Or is he simply a greedy jerk?
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Milkman puts this perfectly right after his next-to-last confrontation with Guitar: Macon Dead II "paid homage to his own father's life and death by loving what that father had loved: property. . . . He loved those things to excess because he loved his father to excess" (300).
It's maybe not a question of "justifying" Macon; more a matter of understanding why he's lived his life as he has, to see what looks like an empty kind of materialism as an expression of *love* rather than *greed*. What we see Milkman developing in these late chapters is empathy, understanding; it doesn't make the people in his life any less dysfunctional, but it allows us to see them as flawed human beings who flounder as they try to express their love for people who are long gone. (Macon and his wife are more alike than they'd care to admit.)
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