Key themes
- Names, identity and what is inherited
- Flight as freedom and as abandonment
- The past that must be retrieved to make sense of the present
About this book
A young man traces his family's history back through myth and migration in search of who he is.
Published in 1977, Song of Solomon won the National Book Critics Circle Award and is the novel most often cited as the work that established Morrison's literary reputation before Beloved. She was 46 when it was published.
Discussion questions
- Milkman's journey from north to south is also a journey into his own history. What does Morrison say through this structure about the relationship between selfhood and ancestry?
- Names are central to the novel — who names us, what names mean, what it costs to be renamed. How does the naming of characters (Pilate, Guitar, Macon) function as a system of meaning?
- Guitar is Milkman's closest friend who becomes something else entirely. How does Morrison use this relationship to explore the different forms that Black political anger can take?
- The novel ends with an act of literal or figurative flight — the interpretation is disputed. What do you think happens, and what does your reading say about the novel's moral?
- Morrison said she wanted to write about Black people without the white gaze — as if white readers didn't exist. How does this ambition shape the novel's texture — and how do you read it as an outsider or an insider to that world?
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Song of Solomon appears on the following curriculum reading lists.
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