Quashee

The protagonist of the novel, Jerome Quashee, is depicted undergoing a religious ritual that blocks - even expunges - all sensual links to the outside world of reality in order to permit him to examine his past life and thus to identify the sources of discomfort and guilt that scarify him and make him query the value of society and life itself.

Pastor O (a Southern evangelical), Quashee's mother, and Pointer Francis are at once carefully wrought representatives of language groups but speak with vocabulary and syntax that is individual: they are delineated participants rather than types.

Throughout the novel Quashee is anxious to solve the perennial question of personal identity: where does he fit in the black-white continuum?