Breaking Double Fetters-a Study Of Black Male Characters In Toni Morrison’s Sula And Song Of Solomon

Toni Morrison is the first African American women writer to win the Nobel Prize for literature in1993. She pays close attention to the fate of the black race in her works. Since the1980s, the criticism has been mostly based on Feminism Criticism, Cultural Criticism, racialism, and writing techniques to analyze Toni Morrison’s novels. However, few scholars studies the black male characters in her novels. It is not that Morrison doesn’t value male characters in her works. On contrary, she highlights the significance of male characters. Morrison once said in an interview that "male characters are more outstanding". The growing and maturity of a man is, according to Morrison, his understanding of his culture and women of his nation.The aim of this paper is to expound Morrison’s treasured hope for black males by closely analyzing several major black male characters in the novel Sula and Song of Solomon. Through study on different roles of three major black male characters-Jude, Ajax and Shadrack-in Sula’s life, the reader can catch Morrison’s intention, which is to hope that black males could gradually abandon the long-existed gender oppression on black women and build a balanced and harmonious relationship with them. Only by this, black men and women can unite as one to promote their subsistence and progress and to resist the main cause-racism-for their predicament.In Song of Solomon, through the depiction of Macon Dead’s twisted values and Milkman, the representative of a middle-class black young man, Morrison shows incisively the modern African Americans’bitterness, lost, confusion and ignorance derived from their "rootlessness" underneath the mainstream of the culture of American racial discrimination and segregation. Morrison holds treasured wish for the lost black men to rediscover their black identity, to grow into maturity by understanding their national history and inheriting the African culture.