Emo

Character Analysis

Emo is Ceremony's big bad wolf. There is seriously nothing likable about this guy: he's a sadistic killing machine, a racist, and he tells bad jokes. But when a guy like Emo tells an unfunny joke, you laugh anyway. Trust us, you do NOT want to get on this guy's bad side.

So what's Emo like? Allow us to paint a little picture for you. Emo's the kind of guy who smashed an entire field of melons when he was a kid just for the pleasure of destroying something. He actually enjoys the smell of blood and the quiver of a dying body. Torture is one of his favorite pastimes. His only regret about WWII is that they didn't drop more bombs on the Japanese. This guy is a seriously disturbed creep.

While the other guys seem to treat Emo with wary respect, Tayo is always on the verge of punching him in the nose or stabbing him in the belly, as the case may be. So it's no secret that Emo is the story's antagonist. He literally antagonizes Tayo every chance he gets.

It might seem strange that this novel, which portrays white culture as the source of society's greatest evils, should have a Native American character as the main villain. But Emo's character actually makes perfect sense when you consider that it represents the ugly result of racial oppression. White culture teaches Emo (and other Native Americans in the novel) to feel ashamed of his own identity and to desire what white people have: cities, wealth, and white women. Ceremony makes the argument that a man like Emo is what results when the anger produced by self-loathing and envy is given an outlet in a culture of violence.