Summary Of Pinkie In Their Eyes Were Watching God

I agree that the novel asserts that a Catholic is more capable of evil than anyone. Pinkie is a character who openly admits that he is Catholic, and yet Greene makes him the most evil character of all, and this characterization is telling. Because a Catholic like Pinkie knows about evil and was taught right and wrong, he has the ability to do terrible things that he knows are wrong, making him even more evil. A non-Catholic may not have been taught morality, meaning that if they do the same thing, they wouldn’t have known just how bad their action was compared to a Catholic. An example of this would be how Pinkie knows he is committing mortal sin when he marries Rose because he has the Catholic knowledge of right and wrong. An evil person is someone who is openly choosing to do the wrong thing when they know they shouldn’t because they know the consequences. Pinkie knows he shouldn’t murder, but he does anyway, demonstrating that he is more capable of evil than anyone else.

Pinkie also believes that he “[is] damned” (135), meaning that he has the knowledge of good and evil, but

She is comfortable with herself and full of vitality, and her physical attributes also support this as she is described as a “fat spotty creature in pink whose feet hardly touched the ground” (11). Meanwhile, Pinkie is bony and skinny and uncomfortable with everything in his world. Pinkie’s eyes are also “slatey” and “touched with the annihilating eternity from which he had come and to which he went." (20). He carries his religion around like it is a burden to him, because he understands that heaven is so far out of reach to him