Chapter 5 presents a series of contrasts and mirror images that reflect the tenuous relationships between various characters and provide conflicting perspectives on love, sex, and survival.
Milkman's pondering his impending death at the hands of Hagar, his distraught ex-lover, at the beginning of the chapter evokes many similar references to the presence of death throughout the novel. For example, note that Milkman's picturing his own death as a "spurt of wine-red blood" foreshadows Hagar's funeral scene at the end of Chapter 13, when a "sympathetic" wino drops his liquor bottle, "spurting emerald glass and jungle-red wine everywhere." Resigned to let Hagar kill him if she wants to and can, Milkman is almost exhilarated by thoughts of death: "Gradually his fear of and eagerness for death returned." His death-wish mirrors his mother's own obsession with death, "a more interesting subject than life."
The scene in which Milkman criticizes Guitar's efforts to make tea, followed by his joke about being a "soft-fried egg," recalls the friends' visit to Pilate's house in Chapter 2, when she introduced them to the ritual of making a perfect soft-boiled egg. Consequently, even as Milkman feels like a "garbage pail for the actions and hatreds of other people," we realize that within him lies a seed of spiritual awareness planted by Pilate that has the potential to counter his destructive self-image and overpower his morbid death-wish.
Milkman's following his mother to Fairfield Cemetery mirrors Hagar's stalking Milkman through the streets of Southside. This similarity also establishes a contrast between the white community of Fairfield, distinguished by its sheltered suburbs, and the black community of Southside, noted for its bars and barbershops. Additionally, Ruth's visit to the graveyard, ironically another type of "graveyard" love, highlights the racist practice of establishing separate cemeteries for blacks and whites.
