Free Food for Millionaires

In the first year after she graduates from college, though Casey moves forward on a surface level with her life, she remains unable to resolve any of her fundamental conflicts. Casey is the protagonist of the novel. However, Lee interweaves numerous subplots related to secondary characters, using omniscient third-person narration to give insight into their thoughts and feelings. For example, readers learn the intensity of love Casey’s mother felt on giving birth: “[W]hen Casey was born, Leah remembered […] thinking, I would die for you” (116). Leah is a modest and quiet character; it is unlikely that Leah would ever speak such thoughts aloud. The omniscient narration is therefore an important feature of the novel, providing access to information that even the protagonist lacks. This narrative technique contributes to the gray-area nature of Lee’s novels, which have no clear heroes or villains; all of the characters are simultaneously both flawed and sympathetic in some ways. For example, as the theme of Giving in to Compulsions Despite Consequences emerges, this technique helps sustain empathy for the characters even as their behavior undermines it. 

Lee uses third-person narration not only to evoke empathy for characters but also to emphasize that even seemingly ordinary people have rich and complex inner lives. Later, Casey will reveal that the novel Middlemarch by George Eliot is one of her favorite books, and Lee has also cited Middlemarch as a formative influence in the development of her literary style. Eliot’s novel is well-known for providing thoughtful exploration of the inner worlds of a wide cast of characters who live seemingly unremarkable lives in an English country-village; Lee’s own complex multi-plot structure evokes techniques associated with Eliot and other 19th-century realist novels. In the context of Lee’s own approach to realism, the theme of Creativity and the Value of Beauty takes on nuanced tones; that is, the context heightens the importance of creativity and the value of aesthetics for surviving in a world that is otherwise indifferent to its inhabitants’ fates.

Throughout these chapters, Casey struggles with the instability of the relationships in her life, which she cannot fully sever or fully secure. Casey’s relationship with her family is not completely cut off after her father disowns her; her mother actively seeks her out, and Casey also encounters her parents at Ella’s wedding. Because Casey is still on the fringes of a close-knit community, she cannot fully free herself from her parents. Nonetheless, her relationship with Leah and Joseph grows more fractured as a result of her parents learning that Casey is in a relationship with a white man. Casey has gone to great pains to conceal her relationship, which develops a motif of secret and illicit relationships (Ted, for example, will pursue an extramarital affair with Delia, while Leah will conceal her infatuation with Charles Hong). Despite being confident and assertive in some ways, Casey is terrified to have her parents learn the truth about who she is dating, and this fear creates a wedge that will lead her relationship with Jay to collapse for a second and final time. Casey’s frustration with Jay becomes linked to her own ambivalent cultural position, as captured in her final reflections about him: “[S]he suddenly hated him for being an American and herself for feeling so foreign when she was with him. She hated his ideas of rugged individualism, self-determination […] only the most selfish person on earth could live that way” (122).

After the conflict between Jay and her parents at Ella’s wedding, Casey conclusively realizes that she and Jay cannot successfully build a life together. This realization develops a variation on the theme of Tension Alongside Class Mobility. Casey and Jay initially believe that Casey has sufficiently integrated into American values and worldviews for the two of them to largely live according to Jay’s perspective. However, Casey comes to realize that Jay’s unwillingness to compromise or adapt on this front is more problematic than she once thought: “Jay, in his unyielding American optimism, refused to see that she came from a culture where good intentions and clear talk wouldn’t cover all wounds” (153). Casey breaks off her relationship with Jay even though she loves him and even though marrying him would likely provide her with significantly more financial stability. Casey questions her decision: “[W]as no love better than love without enough understanding?” (153). But she also has faith in her intuition.

The second break-up with Jay creates a sense of parallelism and circularity in the first section of the novel; Casey breaks up with Jay for a second time approximately one year after their first break-up (sometime around June 1994). Approximately one year after the events of the plot begin, Casey is more or less back where she started: her relationship with Jay has ended, now for a second time; she is still alienated from her family; and she lacks a defined career path. Since she has been living with Jay, Casey also needs to yet again find a new place to live. Casey’s circuitous path forward in her first year after graduation shows that she has still not fully developed a sense of purpose and that she is also affected by external events unfolding around her.