I liked Morrison's use of flashbacks from the lives of Pecola's parents, particularly Cholly. It's particularly interesting because throughout the whole novel up to that point, the reader (or I at least) had viewed Cholly as some awful, odious drunkard who did such inexcusably horrible and sick things, i.e. impregnated his own 11-year-old daughter. Yet, this chapter presents a different image: that of young, insecure, ashamed Cholly who is humiliated and degraded by white police officers while he is having sex for the first time, and rejected by his father, after having embarked on a journey to find him. The first humiliating instance, and then the pitiful anticlimax, change the reader's attitude toward Cholly. For me, it was a mix of pity and compassion, when earlier on in the novel I couldn't imagine feeling anything but disgust for him. I liked this chapter because it gave me a perspective on why Cholly is the way he is. The traumatic event associated with "muscadine and flashlight on his behind" gave him a hatred toward women-- he developed a profound hatred for Darlene because it was easier to hate "the one who had created the situation and bore witness to his failure, his impotence" (151) then the white men, because the latter hatred would destroy him. (This is similar to Claudia's inability to hate white girls-- her hatred was translated into love and adoration) This disgust and hatred toward women, especially those helpless and pitiful, is evident, in a way, when he rapes Pecola. Similarly, the influence of his lonely childhood and lack of stable family, or family at all, is described: "Had he not been alone in the world since he was thirteen, knowing only a dying old woman who felt responsible for him, but whose age, sex, and interests were so remote from his own, he might have felt a stable connection between himself and the children." That is not to say that his actions-- beating his wife, setting the house on fire, raping his daughter, and being a horrible father and husband in general-- are justified by his childhood experiences, but just that it's evident that events and aspects of his life have contributed to his disfunctional, warped conception of family and duty.