Colleen King

Ms. Romano

4 AP English, Per. 5

5 May 2014

Post #1

Toni Morrison’s novels have an ability to take people’s breath away due to the way she showcases human truths and sufferings that people experience from generation to generation, and her novel Song of Solomon is no exception. From what I have read so far, Milkman seems to be the protagonist who fights to seal his own identity, manhood, and happiness while others use him or treat him as a child. He lives with a power and money-hungry father, a defeated mother, and two spoiled sisters, all who have past secrets and tragedies that affect every aspect of their lives. His has one best friend, Guitar, and spends most of his youth following Hagar, his older cousin, in a puppy-love and passionate relationship. Milkman struggles through his relationships with all of these characters because they all keep secrets of their and his pasts from him. Morrison gradually reveals each character’s past to Milkman and it turns out that their past affects who he has become. Macon, Milkman’s father, reveals that he watched Milkman’s mother, Ruth, fondle her dead father’s body and lost his love for her in that moment. Ruth later reveals that her intimacy with her father occurred because he was the only person in her life that cared for her and that Macon tried to kill her father and Milkman. These stories unveil Macon’s hatred and Ruth’s powerlessness to Milkman and help him see why his parents treat each other with such indifference. I have noticed this trend in a lot of Milkman’s other relationships and am beginning to see that Morrison uses the past’s effect on Milkman as a way to state that the past dictates who humans become and what their descendants futures have in store. In particular, she highlights the past’s effect from generation to generation through black history.

I just left off on a scene in which Guitar tells Milkman that he kills innocent white people to balance out the ratio of black people the whites kill. He justifies his actions by saying that the whites kill black men who have a good six to seven generations of lineage ahead of them and destroy those possible futures, so he must balance the population slant so that whites do not take out the black race. This idea intrigued me and I am thinking of doing my research portion of this project on hate crimes against blacks conducted during the time period that this book was written. Morrison weaves in a lot of history in a work of fiction by having her characters mention Hitler, Malcolm X, Emmett Till, Eleanor Roosevelt, and so many others. I want to link the events she talks about together in order to create the motif/theme we must come up with for our overarching project. I like the way Morrison shows how greatly the past affects the future and want to showcase that with my project.

There are still a few other ideas I have been toiling with such as religion’s function in the novel and the 

definition of manhood across cultures (as these are ideas that appear throughout the novel as well);

this is just the idea that jumped out at me almost immediately and I have been reading for in the novel.