“Why not me”

“Why not me?” is an imagined question, not a reply spoken in the scene: as Van Go Jenkins faces Willy the wino, he pictures Rexall growing up and asking why he, too, has been left with so little. The question gives Van Go’s self-hatred a future tense, connecting his judgment of himself to the child he fears may inherit the consequences of his life.

The Question in Van Go’s Crisis

The phrase occurs in a rush of self-recognition. Van Go sees his own face in Willy’s, then lists the features and habits that make the resemblance feel like a sentence: his hanging arms, his uncaring eyes, his rocking wait for something he will not recognize when it arrives. He imagines his mother bleeding, his children, and Rexall “wifout a brain,” growing up to ask “Why not me?” The question belongs to that projection of the future; it is not presented as something Rexall has actually said.

The imagined question arrives amid a repeated claim of worthlessness. Van Go says he hates Willy, his mother, and himself, and then shoots Willy in the gut. Standing over him, Van Go explains the act through the same self-condemnation: Willy made him, and Van Go believes himself to be worth nothing. The expression extends that judgment beyond the immediate violence. It makes Van Go picture a child confronting the damage that may reach him, even as Van Go is acting out his rage against the man he sees as part of its origin.

Inheritance and Refusal

The question’s force lies in its shift of perspective. Van Go’s attention moves from the face he recognizes as his own to Rexall as a future person who might demand an explanation. The scene does not answer the question or establish that Rexall will ask it; instead, it gives the feared question a place inside Van Go’s vision of what comes next. The child’s imagined words make the consequences of Van Go’s self-image reach beyond himself.

A later exchange with an old woman adds another moment of rejection and defiance to this context. When she tells him, “Just give up, boy,” Van Go answers, “You aint my mama.” She replies, “Thank the Lord for that.” The exchange does not repeat “Why not me?” or resolve the future Van Go imagines for Rexall. It does, however, place his vision of inherited hurt beside a blunt refusal of maternal authority and a rebuff in return: the question remains suspended rather than answered.