Song of Solomon Identity Quotes

Can we say Milkman is afraid of commitment? He’s forever staring at behinds. When he’s riding in the family hearse as a four year-old, he’s looking at the view behind him. When he meets Hagar, he falls in love with her behind. When he walks down a street, he’s going in the opposite direction of everyone else there. Here we see him sizing himself up, and the pieces don’t jive; they don’t fit. He doesn’t know what he cares for, believes in, or values. He doesn’t seem to know how to want things.

Again, we see Milky lost at sea on his little boat, trying to gage latitude and longitude by triangulating with the stars. But to no avail. No one can help him out. His family dotes on him, spoils him, and swims in a sea of isolating, truculent affluence. His best friend knows him well, but is growing more and more distant, cultivating his own identity and making a place in the world. Milkman has to figure things out on his own.

Milkman and Guitar talk about Till, the young man who was murdered for whistling at a white woman. As a result, Guitar begins to hold a mirror up to Milkman, showing him that he could never make it in the South. By showing Milkman what he cannot tolerate, Guitar begins to teach his best friend how to know himself, how to find himself. At this moment, we also begin to see a rip in their friendship, because Milkman seems so far away from the black community, whereas Guitar is completely wired in.

Money, affluence, and deprivation make one fine cocktail of self-centeredness. The cruelty of having money and lacking love has kept Ruth so far away from her mansion on Not Doctor Street that she doesn’t know what else is possible in the world. At this moment, we see that she too lacks community, people, or a chorus of girlfriends, sisters, cousins, mothers, and aunts. Like everyone else in the Dead family, she is completely alienated from the outside world and, thus, completely selfish.

It’s hard to believe that there was ever a moment in Pilate’s life when she didn’t know who she was or what she believed in. In fact, this moment takes us by surprise. The woman is close to godliness and, without a belly button and all, it’s easy to imagine her as a divine creature. But here, we get to see Pilate crafting, choosing her identity deliberately and with a scholarly eye. She becomes more human in this sense, and we see how even the most grounded creature in the universe of Song builds her identity, chooses to believe in certain things over others.

Here we broach one of those simple, answerable questions: what is the meaning of life? Guitar believes that to give meaning to one’s life, one has to be deliberate in the living of it. One has to have purpose, goals, and beliefs to get behind. But still, we can’t help ask the same question on Milkman’s mind: can the murdering of random white people give a life meaning?

Milky has gone through life as though he were in a padded room, with nice padded walls and soft padded corners, much like the clouded kingdom where Carebears dwell. The privilege of his life has kept him from having to work too hard, to feel too much, to think too much. But here, it’s as though Milky is let loose upon a room with no padding, with real edges and angles and sharpness for the first time. He has a tangible goal, feels the danger of it, feels the possibility of it, and feels a real desire to want to reach, to want to work for it. Guitar is yet again an incredible professor of life, guiding Milkman towards self-awareness and self-actualization.

Rocked by the epic trek through the Blue Ridge Mountains, Milkman’s body is exhausted. Yet, through the exhaustion, steeped in nature, without the weight of things, objects that he owns, Milkman’s physical body floats away and all that is left is life-giving, blood-pumping self-reflection. This is a sublime moment, meaning Milkman’s physical self sublimes, vaporizes, leaving only his spiritual self behind. His body returns, however, when he is being killed.

Guitar is very much a feminist at this moment, again proving wise beyond his years. Here he’s addressing a woman who embodies the predicament of almost every woman in the Dead lineage for at least four generations, a predicament that originally forced the creation of the song that children still sing in Shalimar. Here Guitar tells Hagar (and the women before her and around her) that she must love herself, must cultivate her own self before being able to love anyone else.

In order to grow into oneself, Guitar believes a person (namely a young woman) needs many people to help her, needs a community to scold her, teach her, praise her, and discipline her along the way. Here the concepts of individuality versus community knock heads once more. You can’t have one without the other it seems.