Summary:
Discusses the novel Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison. Provides a character analysis of Milkman. Describes his crisis of identity and coming of age.
Our identity is one of the only things we have to call our own. Through a period of a life time ones identity becomes less and less ones' own. This deterioration of identity usually calls for a search, a true calling, to find out who you are, today this might be called a mid life crisis. This crisis of identity and its search is evident with Macon (Milkman) Dead in Toni Morrison's' Song of Solomon.
Milkman for his entire life had been living in his fathers shadow; the notorious tenant owner and resident of Not Doctor Street. Macon (Milkman) struggles with the fact that he does not receive respect in his town for being a man, but for the influence and money which is father has obtained. Milkman's struggle begins as most midlife crisis do when something completely life shattering about the past is brought forward. For Milkman, through a physical fight between his father and his mother, he comes to learn that his mother had breast fed him up to his late pre-teen years. This realization for milkman that his mothers love is more than a motherly love was shattering. Only days later does Milkman also learn that his father sister had left him for dead in the woods, and had taken the gold in which they had found. These incidences left Milkman unknowing of who he had been for the last thirty years, and yearning for his true identity.
This crisis and yearning for identity aids Milkman in finally leaving. When Milkman lived in the town he was not his own person, he was known because of his father, he did not know himself, and he needed to leave and find the truth. Milkman for his entire life had been living in the shadow of someone else, whether it be his father or Guitar, either way he did not have his own identity when he was with either. In his wild goose chase for gold and family ancestry, Milkman learns that even a crappy $70 car is worth a lot. Milkman stated that he had never felt freer as he cruised the roads of Virginia. Milkman starts to become his own person in his search, realizing that material possessions and such were not he is and that other things such as identity are much more important.
Milkman ages more in his 2 week venture than he had 30 years under the shadow of Guitar and his father. Milkman did not have his own identity, and at the age of 30, he had still not "come of age", his "mid life crisis" changed all of that, and Macon (milkman) truly found out who he was and what it is like to have your own identity and be your own man.
This is the complete article, containing 463 words
(approx. 2 pages at 300 words per page).
