Song of Solomon

Morrison gives this novel its title from the Biblical Song of Solomon — a love poem. How does the Biblical source complicate or enrich the novel? What kind of 'love song' is this?

Every major character in the novel has a name with a story behind it. Analyze the naming of any three characters and argue what Morrison is saying through those names about identity, power, and inheritance.

Guitar's argument for the Seven Days is logically coherent. Where does his reasoning go wrong? Or does it? Use specific dialogue to support your position.

Solomon's flight is presented by Morrison as a real event — not legend, not metaphor. What happens to the novel if you read it as actual? What happens if you read it as purely metaphorical?

Milkman discards Hagar with a politely worded note. Morrison then shows us Hagar's disintegration across several chapters. Why does Morrison spend so much time on Hagar's collapse when Milkman is the protagonist?

Pilate was born without a navel. What does this physical impossibility mean symbolically? How does it function differently from a purely metaphorical description of her freedom?

The children in Shalimar have been singing Solomon's genealogy for generations without knowing it. What does this suggest about oral tradition as a form of historical record? Is it more or less reliable than written history?

Morrison's title, 'Song of Solomon,' names a male ancestor. But Pilate is the novel's moral center, and the women — Ryna, Hagar, Ruth — bear the costs of male transcendence. Whose story is this actually?

Macon Dead II's advice — 'Own things. And let the things you own own other things. Then you'll own yourself' — has some logic to it. When and where is this advice true? When does it destroy?

The novel ends with Milkman leaping toward Guitar — 'If you surrendered to the air, you could ride it.' Does Milkman fly or fall? Does Morrison's refusal to answer matter?

Morrison uses 'Not Doctor Street' (the community's defiant counter-name for an official street) as an example of naming as resistance. Find two more examples of counter-naming or name-resistance in the novel. What do they have in common?

Compare Pilate's relationship to the past (she carries her father's bones without knowing it, for decades) with Milkman's relationship to the past at the novel's beginning. What does each character's relationship to ancestors tell us about their selfhood?

Morrison does not explain how Solomon flew. She also does not explain how Pilate can live without a navel. Why does she refuse to explain these things? What does explanation cost a myth?

Guitar begins the novel as Milkman's closest friend and ends it as his would-be murderer. Trace the path of his radicalization. At what point does his reasoning cross a line — and does Morrison mark that line clearly?

Ruth and Hagar both organize their lives entirely around men who don't deserve it. What does Morrison say about the conditions that produce this kind of self-erasure?

The 'flying Africans' legend comes from real African American folk tradition, particularly from the Georgia Sea Islands. What happens when a novelist takes folk legend as literal truth rather than as metaphor? Is this respect or appropriation?

Milkman starts Part One completely passive — he hasn't chosen his name, his job, his girlfriend, or his values. Map his active decisions in Part Two. At what exact moment does he become an agent of his own story?

The Dead family name was a clerical error by a drunk Union soldier. Three generations later it defines a family's identity. What does this suggest about how systemic racism operates — through grand violence or through administrative carelessness?

Morrison was editing other Black writers' work at Random House while writing this novel. How does the novel's treatment of oral tradition, vernacular speech, and folk legend reflect a politics of what counts as literature?

Ryna's Gulch is named for Ryna's howling grief after Solomon flew away. The landscape absorbs a woman's pain and preserves it. What does this say about how communities remember the people history forgets?

Compare Guitar's argument to a real historical position in the Black liberation movement — Malcolm X's philosophy, the Black Panther Party's platform, or the Deacons for Defense. How does Morrison position Guitar relative to actual political history?

Milkman's class condescension in Shalimar nearly gets him killed. How does the novel treat the tension between Northern Black middle-class identity and Southern Black rural community? Who has to change?

Morrison uses magical realism without the winking distance of some magical realist writers — she doesn't signal that the supernatural is strange. Compare her technique to Gabriel García Márquez. What does the difference in their deployments of magical realism tell us about their different purposes?

Pilate's dying words: 'I wish I'd a knowed more people. I would of loved 'em all.' She has spent the novel being the one person who loves without conditions. Why does she die wishing she had loved more?

The novel's epigraph reads: 'The fathers may soar / And the children may know their names.' Who wrote this? Morrison did — it's her own epigraph. Why does a novel about an ancestor who abandons his children begin with a statement that frames that abandonment as a gift?

Song of Solomon is Morrison's third novel. Her first two (The Bluest Eye, Sula) focus on women protagonists. Why did Morrison choose a male protagonist for this one — and what does the novel gain and lose from Milkman's perspective?

Hagar buys makeup and beauty products to make herself worthy of Milkman's love, then dies. Morrison shows us her shopping in specific detail. What is Morrison doing with consumer products as a vehicle for Hagar's tragedy?

Compare Macon Dead I (the grandfather who built Lincoln's Heaven) to Jay Gatsby. Both are self-made men who built wealth from nothing and were destroyed by forces they couldn't own. What does each novel say about self-making in America — and how does race change the story?

The novel ends in suspension — Milkman's leap, the open air, no resolution. Morrison has been explicit in interviews that she refused to say whether Milkman flies or falls. Why is the refusal itself the point?

Song of Solomon was published in 1977, two years after the end of the Vietnam War and in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement. How does Milkman's journey south — from the industrialized North back to the ancestral South — function as a national allegory? What was America being asked to remember?