`All's well that ends well.' Two completely different authors with two somewhat different styles of writing create two endings, which leave the audience guessing, making assumptions, but assuming that indeed, all is as well as it can possibly be, finally.
Graham Swift creates a vivid description of many generations in a bleak, desolate location known as the fens in his novel Waterland. His character of Dick Crick plays an enormous role throughout the novel, but Swift ends his novel with Dick drunkenly diving overboard into the water so vital to the rest of the novel.
Toni Morrison creates an almost mythical story in a vivid time period and location in her novel Song of Solomon. Her character Milkman goes on a quest of discovery, uncovering many unknown truths about himself and about his own family, and she ends with him leaping from a cliff and into the air, becoming part of the legend that his family is based upon.
Waterland's ending can be easily seen as a suicide as Swift leaves no other option open to Dick's character. Prior to the suicide dive, Tom Crick confronts Dick with two major shocks to his life. One that his father is also his grandfather, and that Tom is the father of the baby Dick assumed was his. Swift has Tom stating that Dick, "Wants releasing"(Swift 318), as if Dick sees no logical conclusion besides his death. Dick, Swift also writes, has had his experience congealed around him into imprisoning solidity. There is no way out for this poor character, and so Swift ends the one way that he can, with Dick's suicide. Dick is a `potato head' and there is literally no other life available to him eve...
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...is family, and while at first he simply assumes that they are folklore, his gradually accepts the fact that perhaps his ancestors could fly, and perhaps he himself can fly, rejecting any thoughts of suicide or revenge in his mind.
These authors create exits for characters, which flow seamlessly with the preceding storylines. The concluding scenes of these novels, while similar in the suicide theme are worlds apart when viewed through direct evidence of the characters actual feelings and past. It is interesting to note that both are basically suicides, but one becomes a clear suicide while the other becomes a liberating jump into family heritage. By using evidence written in specifically for the readers, both of these authors make it very clear how their endings should be understood, so that finally all ends well, understood.
Early in the novel Morrison, uses the juxtaposition of Ruth Foster and Pilate dead, when she tells of the flight of Mr. Robert Smith from Mercy Hospital. Ruth Foster, not yet described as such, is known as the “dead doctor’s daughter” (5). During this scene her insignificance is made clear, “the rose-petal scramble, got a lot of attention, but the pregnant lady’s moans did not” (5). This scene perfectly embodies Ruth Foster’s character, as diminutive, and unimportant, she also ignores the flight of the Mr. Smith as the pedestrians ignore her and Mr. Smith. On the other hand, Pilate Dead, is the singer in the crowd that notices Mr. Smith’s flight and says, “O Sugarman done fly away” (6), introducing the theme of the novel, flight, and representing her understanding of it, while others remain oblivious. This is important, because this is Milkman’s journey, the discovery of the flight of his people, or the realization of his people’s culture. Pilate, Milkman’s aunt, also foreshadows his “flight”, which is a main theme of the novel, ‘A little bird’ll be here with the morning” (9), whereas his mother, Ruth, says, “It can’t be...It’s too soon,” (9) this shows her role in the novel as keeping Milkman from his flight, while Pilate teaches him he can fly. "Mr. Smith's blue silk wings must have left their mark, because when the little boy discovered, at four, the same thing Mr. Smith had learned earlier - that only birds and airplanes could fly - he lost all interest in himself" (9). Tis loss of flight symbolizes Milkman’s loss of his heritage, which Pilate tries to reinstall in him, ...
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.
Throughout literature it has been common for authors to use allusions to complement recurrent motifs in their work. In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Milkman learns that his desire to fly has been passed down to him from his ancestor Solomon. As Milkman is figuring out the puzzle of his ancestry, he realizes that when Solomon tried to take his youngest son, Jake, flying with him, he dropped him and Jake never arrived with his father to their destination.
McKay, Nellie, editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, G.K. Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Rigney, Barbara.
Hiding from those who would find him and carry out the wrath of vengeance upon him, the protagonist plans his escape. About to dive in the rancid water and swim for it, a body in the shallows abruptly stops him. The bloated and decomposing corpse pulls the narrator back from his adrenaline-induced frenzy. After a few moments, he settles and reflects, “I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back” (193). The narrator can almost envision himself as the man whose corpse is before him. Both deceased from mysterious causes, involved in shady activities, and left to rot in the stagnant lake water, and never to be discovered by the outside world. This marks the point where the main character is the closest he has ever been to death. Although he makes it out alive, the protagonist and his outlook on life are forever changed.
Toni Morrison's novel “Song of Solomon" is an evident example of literary work that utilizes the plight of the African-American community to develop an in-depth and complex storyline and plot. Not only does Toni Morrison use specific historical figures as references for her own characters, she also makes use of biblical figures, and mythological Greek gods and goddesses. When evaluating Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” you can relate each and every character to a specific historical figure or mythological being in history. But to focus on a specific character you would look towards one of the protagonists. Guitar and Milkman can serve as main individuals that can be symbolic of other political and civil rights activist involved in history.
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.
...is past, as well as the mistakes of the people in his community. Milkman fights the oppression much like his great grandfather does by rising above it, and by soaring over his own oppression. Since he used a non-violent stance I felt this could represent Martin Luther King Jr. who helped African Americans to rise above oppression as well. Although he doesn’t bring a change of masses, Milkman himself has changed, and through time he can show others how to ride the wind. Milkman helps to show that flying does not have to be seen as a physical action, but as an ability an individual has to make a life away from oppression, in a world that oppresses many. An individual flying in the novel is seen as a victory over all the obstacles one has to hurdle in life. It’s the character of the individual that determines whether or not you surrender to the wind and fly, or if you stay on the Earth wondering why things never change.
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
...it up to each reader to draw their own conclusions and search their own feelings. At the false climax, the reader was surprised to learn that the quite, well-liked, polite, little convent girl was colored. Now the reader had to evaluate how the forces within their society might have driven such an innocent to commit suicide.
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).
end. This essay will further show how both stories shared similar endings, while at the same time
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.