Essay on Flight in Song of Solomon -- Song Solomon Toni Morrison essay

Theme of Flight in Song of Solomon Clearly, the significant silences and the stunning absences throughout Morrisons texts become profoundly semipolitical as well as stylistically crucial. Morrison describes her own work as containing holes and spaces so the reader can come into it (Tate 125), testament to her rejection of theories that privilege j the indite over the reader. Morrison disdains such hierarchies in which the reader as participant in the text is ignored My writing expects, demands participatory reading, and I think that is what literature is sibyllic to do. Its not just about telling the story its about involving the reader ... we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to feel this experience (Tate 125). But Morrison also indicates in each of her novels that images of the zero, the absence, the silence that is both chosen and enforced, are ideologically and politically revelatory. Morrisons male characters ... imagine themselves in fli ght and are almost all in love with airplanes. ... In the tradition of raw literature since Richard Wrights Native Son, however, the privilege of flight, at least in airplanes, is mostly reserved for white boys. Black males, in Morrison, fly only metaphorically, and then only with the assistance and the inspiration of black women. According to Baker, in his aptly titled When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith, flight is a function of black womans conjure and not black male industrial initiative (105). ... Song of Solomon opens with the image of attempted flight, as Robert Smith, ironically an agent of the North Carolina Mutual support Insurance company, promises to take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings (3). Pilate (P... ... style and in an attempt to discount linearity as a value.) It would be worse than useless, for example, to talk about plot development in Morrisons novels there is plot, certainly, but its revelation culminates or evolves through a functioning of c ompilation of multiple points of view, varieties of interpretation of events (and some of these contradictory), through repetition and reiteration. As there is no climax, in the usual sense, so also there is no resolution, no series of events that can conveniently be labeled beginning, middle, end. Works Cited McKay, Nellie, editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, G.K. Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York Penguin Books, 1987. Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison, Ohio State University Press Columbus, 1991. Tate, C., ed. Black Women Writers at Work, Continuum, 1986.