Alex Rifken
Engs 57
Essay One – Prompt 10
Toni Morrison’s novel, Song of Solomon, is a coming of age story, with the main component of a characters identities being connected to their name. Names reflect a character’s personality, and are what influences a characters life. In Milkman’s case, searching for his story is equivalent to searching out his name. With each story he hears about his ancestors, he moves closer to reclaiming the identity of his forefathers. Compelled to find both his individual and collective identity, he wrestles with the beliefs of the black community and the emptiness that haunts him. Milkman, along with the reader, comes to understands that all names have a story to them, and each story plays a pivotal role in the ancestry of his family.
The epigraph to Song of Solomon introduces the reader to one of the novels most predominant themes: Names. “The fathers may soar/ and the children may know their names”(epigraph). With these words, even before the novel starts, Morrison is able to connect stories to the names. The stories, presented through the past, present, and future, come to dictate the novels progression through time.
The first chapter of the novel serves as a perfect example of how a name – and in some cases the name refers to a location rather than a character – is able to present a story in a subtle but distinct manner. The novel starts with Mr. Smith, the depressed insurance agent who is getting ready to jump from the top of Mercy Hospital. Smiths name speaks to the role of his character. He is given such a common name that he is almost disseminated into insignificance, there seems to be nothing great about his character. He lives a mundane life. This man is on the edge of a building about to ...
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... understanding and acceptance of the song, Milkman takes pride in his family history. The re¬assembly of all the Dead’s in Shalimar (the place named after their ancestors) gives off a feeling of togetherness. The understanding of the name and the story it symbolizes is what can bring the Dead family back together. The phrase “Song of Solomon” takes on more than one meaning, as the song matches the story of Milkman’s great¬ grandfather and the eponymous Bible story. Yet it serves as a reminder. Just like with so many things in the novel, Morrison shows us that there are many stories and meanings to names. Whether it is used as a street, city, or character, every name has a story. Just as the names of the characters foreshadow what their life is to become, so does Morrison in naming the novel, as the name of it predicts it’s ending, as if done by destiny.
ames are one of the first identifiers a person is given, and yet as infants they are given no choice in this identifier that will be with them for the rest of their lives. In Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon the use of the biblical names Hagar and Pilate serve as a means to show the importance of defining the path of one’s life for one's self, as supposed to letting one's name define it for them. Through juxtaposition and parallels, Morrison teaches a universal lesson of the importance of self definition.
The book called Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, deals with many real life issues, most of which are illustrated by the relationships between different family members.
When Milkman goes to Pennsylvania to look for the gold, he was actually in search of his family’s past. One of the themes in the story is how the history of African Americans histories are not clear and unrecorded. The fact that the history of Milkman’s family history is so unclear and unrecorded he goes through a long journey to find it. Along the way he goes through many places and meets many people that help him find his family history.
The tale of the flying African represents a common dream, a common disappointment, and a group identity. As the object of Milkman's quest, it suggests a multi-leveled equivalence between individual identity and community. Simply as a folktale, it is an artifact of Afro-American history; its content links Afro-American to pan-African history; it is localized to represent Milkman's family history. His discovery of the tale thus represents Milkman's discovery of his membership in ever more inclusive communities: his family, Afro-Americans, all blacks. When Milkman realizes he can "fly" as a result of discovering his flying ancestor, his quest itself parallels Solomon's own flight back to Africa; it, too, represents a return to the origins of the community.
In Song of Solomon, a novel by Toni Morrison, flight is used as a literal and metaphorical symbol of escape. Each individual character that chooses to fly in the novel is “flying” away from a hardship or a seemingly impossible situation. However, by choosing to escape, one is also deliberately choosing to abandon family and community members. The first reference to this idea is found in the novel’s epigraph: “The fathers may soar/ And the children may know their names,” which introduces the idea that while flight can be an escape, it can also be harmful to those left behind. However, while the male characters who achieve flight do so by abandoning their female partners and family, the female characters master flight without abandoning those they love. Throughout the novel, human flight is accepted as a natural occurrence, while those who doubt human flight, such as Milkman, are viewed as abnormal and are isolated from the community. It is only when Milkman begins to believe in flight as a natural occurrence that he is welcomed back into the community and sheds his feelings of isolation.
In Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, men discover themselves through flight. While the motif of flight is liberating for men, it has negative consequences for women. Commonly, the women of Song of Solomon are abandoned by men, both physically and emotionally. Many times they suffer as a result as an abandonment, but there are exceptions in which women can pick themselves up or are undisturbed. Morrison explores in Song of Solomon the abandonment of women by men.
In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the character of Milkman gradually learns to respect and to listen to women. This essay will examine Milkman's transformation from boy to man.
In Song of Solomon, through many different types of love, Ruth's incestuous love, Milkman and Hagar's romantic love, and Guitar's love for his race, Toni Morrison demonstrates not only the readiness with which love will turn into a devastating and destructive force, but also the immediacy with which it will do so. Morrison tackles the amorphous and resilient human emotion of love not to glorify the joyous feelings it can effect but to warn readers of love's volatile nature. Simultaneously, however, she gives the reader a clear sense of what love is not. Morrison explicitly states that true love is not destructive. In essence, she illustrates that if "love" is destructive, it is most likely, a mutation of love, something impure, because love is all that is pure and true.
Freedom is heavily sought after and symbolized by flight with prominent themes of materialism, classism, and racism throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The characters Milkman and Macon Dead represent these themes as Macon raises Milkman based on his own belief that ownership of people and wealth will give an individual freedom. Milkman grows up taking this idea as a way to personally obtain freedom while also coming to difficult terms with the racism and privilege that comes with these ideas and how they affect family and African Americans, and a way to use it as a search for an individual 's true self. Through the novel, Morrison shows that both set themselves in a state of mental imprisonment to these materials
In Song of Solomon Toni Morrison tells a story of one black man's journey toward an understanding of his own identity and his African American roots. This black man, Macon "Milkman" Dead III, transforms throughout the novel from a naïve, egocentric, young man to a self-assured adult with an understanding of the importance of morals and family values. Milkman is born into the burdens of the materialistic values of his father and the weight of a racist society. Over the course of his journey into his family's past he discovers his family's values and ancestry, rids himself of the weight of his father's expectations and society's limitations, and literally learns to fly.
Song of Solomon tells the story of Dead's unwitting search for identity. Milkman appears to be destined for a life of self-alienation and isolation because of his commitment to the materialism and the linear conception of time that are part of the legacy he receives from his father, Macon Dead. However, during a trip to his ancestral home, “Milkman comes to understand his place in a cultural and familial community and to appreciate the value of conceiving of time as a cyclical process”(Smith 58).
The religious references imbue the novel with greater meaning; Sethe’s story becomes much larger than its beginning or its end. Her story spans the Old and the New Testament, following the struggles of Cain to the sacrifice of the Christ. Sethe emerges as a universal figure, drawing together the disparate parts of the Creator, the Son and the Holy Spirit. At the end of the novel, Morrison claims that “This is not a story to pass on” (324); however, her use of timeless imagery refutes that idea. Her story becomes part of the enduring dialogue about the nature of good and evil as well as redemption and sin. Sethe’s specific experiences put a face on the experience of slavery, and coupled with the biblical allusions which add gravity to her suffering, ensure that this will, indeed, be a story to pass
Milkman is born on the day that Mr. Smith kills himself trying to fly; Milkman as a child wanted to fly until he found out that people could not. When he found, "that only birds and airplanes could fly&emdash;he lost all interest in himself" (9). The novel Song of Solomon is about an African American man nicknamed Milkman. This novel, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was first published in 1977, shows a great deal of the African American culture, and the discrimination within their culture at the time Song of Solomon takes place. In part one, the setting is in a North Carolina town in the 30's and 40's.
When one is confronted with a problem, we find a solution easily, but when a society is confronted with a problem, the solution tends to prolong itself. One major issue that is often discussed in today’s society that has been here for as long as we’ve known it, is racism. Racism is also a very repetitive theme in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon. Almost every character has experienced racism whether it be towards them or they are the ones giving the racism in this novel. Racism is a very controversial topic as many have different perspectives of it. In Toni’s novel, three characters that have very distinct perspectives on racism are Macon Dead, Guitar, and Dr. Foster. These characters play vital roles throughout the novel.
...ba (112). Throughout the novel, Sethe is devoted to the search of her husband just like Solomon’s beloved wife. Although Sethe never reunites with her husband because he was killed by slaveholders, Morrison creates a replacement in the character Paul D, another former slave. Paul D satisfies the biblical beloved’s description of Sethe’s bridegroom: “I am my beloved’s and his desire is toward me” (7:10), thus fulfilling the promise of a requited love that is pictured in the union of Solomon and Sheba (120).