Song of Solomon
Toni Morrison (1977)
“A Black man searches for his identity through his family's mythic past — and discovers that his ancestors could literally fly.”
EraContemporary / African American Literature
Pages337
Difficulty★★★★☆ Advanced
AP Appearances9
Character Analysis
Named for a humiliating act of observation, Milkman spends Part One drifting passively through a life shaped entirely by his father's cold ambitions and his mother's arrested grief. He is Morrison's most morally compromised protagonist — he treats Hagar as a convenience, dismisses his cousins, and carries his father's class contempt south with him. His transformation in Part Two is genuine: he earns his knowledge by having everything stripped from him. But Morrison refuses to forgive him cheaply. Hagar is dead because of him, and the novel never lets him forget it.