He escapes prison time on grounds of insanity. At the end of the novel, Foy has another crisis and threatens to shoot himself, before ultimately shooting the narrator. Foy dislikes the narrator, who he calls “the sellout.” He believes that the narrator is on “the wrong side” because he embraces segregation, yet refuses to understand that the narrator is only doing this in an effort to bring back Dickens. Foy stole the narrator’s father’s ideas and pretended they were his own, yet still called on the narrator’s father when he had a mental health crisis years later. Furthermore, he explicitly tries to avoid confronting stereotypes and racism directly-thus taking the opposite approach to the narrator and the narrator’s father-by rewriting classic literature to remove any racial slurs or references to slavery. He is extraordinarily vain, and although his work centers around black people, he seems more interested in becoming rich and famous than fighting for racial equality. The Sellout takes place in the peripheries of Los Angeles, in a fictional town that used to be called Dickens. Foy Cheshire is an academic, “fading TV personality,” and the cofounder of the Dum Dum Donut Intellectuals. Paul Beatty’s The Sellout offers us ample ground to think about craft and theme: every page is rich in detail and images, generating new reversals, ironies, and constellations on how we are to think about race, identity, and power.
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