Pilate and Ruth = Clarissa and Septimus
On the surface level, Ruth and Pilate are polar opposites of each other. Ruth grew up in the large house of her father, who was the only African American doctor in her neighborhood, while Pilate grew up in her dad's farmland and became an orphan when she was 12. Ruth is the mother of Macon's patriarchal family who often gets physically/mentally abused by her husband, and Pilate is the head of her matriarchal three-generational family. Underneath, however, these characters share some deep similarities. Fundamentally, these two characters grew up within a family without their mother and inevitably were heavily impacted by their fathers. An important way that they are impacted by their fathers is through their death, which leads both characters to become fearless in the face of death. For Pilate, she reveals that interacting with her father’s ghost allows her to feel indifferent/comfortable toward death: “death held no terrors for her (she spoke often to the dead), she knew there