The Godfather as Philosophy: Honor, Power, Family, and Evil

The Godfather describes the existential conflict between two sets of values partially constituting competing prescriptive and descriptive visions of the world: a nineteenth-century Sicilian perspective grounded in honor and the accumulation of power within a fixed family order and a twentieth-century American perspective celebrating individualism and commercial success. Neither the film nor the book upon which it is based concludes that one of these sets of values is inherently superior. However, the two sets of values coalesce uneasily in the same cultural setting, and their conflict is irresolvable. Ultimately, the Sicilian perspective must wither away in the United States because, unlike the old country, the new world lacks its sustaining cultural conditions. This reading interprets The Godfather as, among other things, a commentary on the transformation of personal identity within the Sicilian immigrant experience.