| As the first black female writer who is granted the Nobel Prize for literature, Toni Morrison (1931-) has been keeping her eyes on the Afro-American history and current status, and absorbed much from her black traditional culture. Committed to presenting and exploring the African American survival and destiny, Morrison attracts academic attention and gains worldwide recognition due to the forceful and beautiful language in her works.Song of Solomon is Toni Morrison’s third novel, and it is the only one that has a black male as the protagonist up to date. This novel established her position in American fiction world, making her one of the greatest writers in contemporary America. Through a full analysis of the three male characters in the novel, the present thesis points out that they represent three different types of African Americans respectively. With the consideration of the writer’s personal experience and the social context for the novel, this thesis has made an exploration of the two deep reasons for Morrison to create the three male characters.Macon Dead II is a worshiper of material possessions. Thinking that material things can help him win anything, he is indifferent to his family members as well as people around him. In the mean time, he models after the white in every aspect, therefore he is whitened. He is the representative of the whitened black bourgeois. Brought up in a well-off black family, Milkman Dead resembles his father in many aspects, living a boring and aimless life before the age of twenty-two. After his journey south, he transforms from a selfish and assimilated black young man to an inheritor of his black cultural heritage, and gets matured both physically and mentally. He is the representative of the middle-class youth in search of the African American culture. Born in a poor lower-class family, Guitar Bains is full of hatred towards the white because of his miserable childhood. He takes revenges on the white by resorting to extreme violence. He is the representative of the radical lower-class black nationalists.Through the depiction of the three male characters, Morrison reveals the three types of African American people who seek for the ways out of racism in the white-dominated society. The middle class represented by Macon choose to integrate blindly into the mainstream society by means of assimilation, during this process, they throw their African cultural heritage away. Consequently, they are not only unaccepted by the white, but isolated from their black community. The lower-class representative Guitar resorts to violence to take vengeance on all the whites as the way out of racism, which also proves to be a dead end. Obviously, Morrison shows her disapproval towards the two extreme approaches. What Morrison advocates is Milkman’s way to return to the black culture to get the power to overcome racism so as to achieve the real equality with the whites. What Morrison suggests through Milkman is that only by returning to the African traditional culture can the African American people survive wholly in the racial American society.As the protagonist, Milkman’s initiation is under the guidance of the African American women represented by his aunt Pilate and the old black woman Circe, who play a vital role as his mental tutors. Through the depiction of the two women images, Morrison highlights black women’s power in the Afro-American gender relationships. |
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