On The "Lost" Blacks In Song Of Solomon

Toni Morrison is the most famous and important African-American woman writer and the first African-American writer who wins the Nobel Prize for Literature. As an African-American writer, she is always reflecting and exploring the African- American history, fate and spiritual world. Her courage, unique personality, original viewpoints and her melodious, impressive and poetic writing style have brought her splendid academic achievements and worldwide recognition.Song of Solomon, published in 1977, is Toni Morrison's third and representative novel and a breakthrough in African- American literature. It marks the maturity of her literary creation and secures her position in American literature. It has brought her national attention and won her National Book Critics Award in 1978.Through the depiction of the three generations of Macon Dead family, the book ruthlessly exposes the brutal truth of the severe destruction of both the physical and the spiritual life of African-Americans by slavery and racism, the erosion and disintegration of the conscience and values of African-Americans, the hesitation, dilemma and search between the belief of the black and that of the white, between the tradition and the modern civilization, the conflicts and struggle between the African-Americans themselves. This novel is a breakthrough in Morrison's literary career. By depicting the growth and the journey of Milkman Dead, she attempts to find a way out for her race, that is, " fly without leaving the ground".Although scholars have made extensive research on Song of Solomon, this thesis supports that Morrison is telling her readers that the real reason why the African-Americans have failed to gain their self-realization is that it is the "lost" life that is the obstacle on their way to a happy life. At the same time, she indicates that the way out of such life is not violence, hatred and hostility, not the assimilation into the white culture, not the African tradition only, but the "meaning territory" which means that African-Americans are the inseparable part of American society, not outsiders and that they can gain self-actualization by taking the advantages of both the black and the white culture.This paper attempts a detailed study of the loss of African-Americans' goals in life in three chapters. The loss of identity is elaborated in Chapter One, which intends to manifest the anguish of African-Americans when they lose their "root". First, the importance of ancestry will be dealt with, showing the fact that ancestry is the essential part of African-Americans' life by taking the example of Milkman. Then the significance of names to the African-Americans, their struggle for them and the panics at the loss of them will be discussed. Chapter Two dwells on the topic of the loss of culture. Clash between the white and black cultures and different features of the two cultures will be explored, followed by the examples of the "Bleached" Black, represented by those characters such as Macon Dead, his wife Ruth and Hagar, who blindly seek the white culture and end up losing their own culture and living a distorted life. Meanwhile, the life of Pilate, the representative of African tradition...