Identity and Racial Bias in Erasure Cedric Dent, Jr. College

Percival Everett writes Erasure with an incredibly avant-garde structure for a fiction novel. The primary narrative is actually a frame story in which a plethora of writings stemming from a myriad of genres are skillfully embedded. The work features a brooding, African-American protagonist named Thelonius Ellison, nicknamed Monk, and serves as his adult diary or journal of sorts. The main entries advance a plot while also providing insight into how Monk came to be the man he is at present, but the journal is riddled with asides and short entries of creative writing ideas (presumably for use in later, yet unwritten stories or just for fun) and pithy observations. The journal suggests that Monk has confected an identity in life that is not affected by race, but the plot brings him to a common but rarely depicted conflict of Man vs. Race that forces him to wrestle with his authorial identity; this conflict evinces the powerful, social forces that White society inherently impose upon him and how those forces impinge upon the ability for Blacks to self-identify, magnifying the conflict through the lens of a profession.

Monk is a literary professor and linguist in an upper-class, Black family of doctors. His journal opens with a...