Essay on Flight in Song of Solomon -- Song Solomon essays

The Importance of rush in Song of Solomon Flight is a major theme in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon. Flight echoes passim the story as a reward, as a hoped-for skill, as an escape, and as proof of intrinsic worth however, by the end this is non so clear a proposition(Lubiano 96). Song of Solomon ends with flight scarce in such a way that the act allows for multiple interpretations self-annihilation real flight and then a wheeling attack on his brother or real flight and then some material body of encounter with the (possibly) killing arms of his brother. That Guitar places his rifle on the ground does not make him any less deadly - his smile and the dropping of the hitman both precede the language of killing arms - and his my man - my main man is an echo of the same irony that allowed Guitar to call Milkman his friend raze after his prior attempt at killing him (Middleton 298). And Guitars arms are killing, not just because they want to answer the challenge posed by Milkma ns move toward him, but because they are the arms that have killed, that killed white people, that butt joint kill anyone who isnt black, or anyone Guitar can convince himself isnt black like Pilate. In other words, Guitar can make an other of anyone who crosses the boundaries of the definitions he constructs for the group that he purports to love black people. What Guitar has constructed in his life is a category of political ciphers that does not allow for the existence of the idiosyncratic Pilate or for the existence of the individualistically apolitical Milkman. Milkmans journey forward to flight is a journey into his last(prenominal) his future is behind him. The texts refutation of the idea of a whole unafraid(p) self is thus crystallized in the ... ... it is Pilate who represents not only embody history but the praxis that comes with recognizing historys effects, the willingness to theorize about possibilities in the brass instrument of history, and the ability to make concrete alternatives to personal and public inequities. Remaining on the ground of history, then, is a labor of love. Works Cited Middleton, David. Toni Morrisons Fiction Contemporary Criticism. parvenue York Garland, 1997. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York Penguin Books, 1987. Lubiano, Wahneema. The Postmodernist Rag Political Identity and the idiom in Song of Solomon, in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press 1995, 93-116, 111-113 Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.