Somewhere I belong

             While Claudia in The Bluest Eye and Nel in Sula are too late to change what has happened in their lives, Milkman Dead, in Morrison's third novel, Song of Solomon, completes a heroic quest for an identity and place within the community. Morrison depicts Milkman in mythic terms. Not only does his story follow a cohesive pattern of miraculous birth, youth/alienation, quest, confrontation, and reintegration into community, but Morrison also infuses it with both Western and African-American myths which blend together the mundane with the magical and the factual with the fantastic. Morrison juxtaposes her own mythic variations with the "reality" of Milkman's conservative, middle-class family which, like himself and his community, is fractured by the absence of a historical or cultural identity. This juxtaposition is central to the novel in that Morrison uses myth to tie Milkman and his people to their historical and cultural past and, more important, to underscore their need for a black cultural and historical context.
             The novel focuses on two morally and ethically antithetical positions, which are represented within the same black family. The father, Macon Dead II, who lives in and espouses the American Dream myth, promulgates the belief that the introjection of white capitalism's competitive, success-oriented motivations and actions are the only viable alternatives for the fulfillment and advancement of the black race. In short, Macon Dead (makin' dead) has buried whatever black identity or heritage he has in an effort to accumulate wealth and the semblance of white upper middle-class status; and thus, like
             blue eyes and Shirley Temple, Macon's myth distorts and dislocates the realities of black life.
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Somewhere I belong. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 18:28, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/15470.html