Milkman

The book keeps getting stranger, the surreal mentality of those who live on Not Doctor street becomes more obvious every time, the characters seem to lead a perfectly normal life but there are little bits and pieces of insanity that tweak the way we look at them. Milkman is a perfectly normal kid inside and out: rebellious, confused and inexperienced but he is able to have a standard social life simply because he has become an expert at hiding the fact that one of his legs is shorter than the other. The leg is a symbol of how Macon Jr has to try harder than most to be average ever since they found out about his mother's secret, its represents Milkman's strength as he deals with embarrassment from day to day, having to cope with something that is not his own fault in the first place, "The deformity was mostly in his mind" (62) a shorter leg is something you're born with. Like the everyone else that lives on Not Doctor street, Milkman has no reason for staying but does anyway. He was born the alleged reincarnation of the man who jumped off a building and the first signs of him wanting to fly away have started to appear. "Why everybody on this side of the street?" (78) he wonders, questioning the natural state of the inhabitants. When he starts seeing the nonsense after living in it his whoile life, he separates himself from the rest of the Not Doctor people, he looks at them with a critical eye like they have looked at him his whole life and begins to discover that there is nothing keeping him there, that he can cross the street whenever he feels like it. I still feel bad for Milkman but now I see he has hope.