`All's well that ends well.' Two completely different authors with two somewhat different styles of writing create two endings, which leave the audience guessing, making assumptions, but assuming that indeed, all is as well as it can possibly be, finally.
Graham Swift creates a vivid description of many generations in a bleak, desolate location known as the fens in his novel Waterland. His character of Dick Crick plays an enormous role throughout the novel, but Swift ends his novel with Dick drunkenly diving overboard into the water so vital to the rest of the novel.
Toni Morrison creates an almost mythical story in a vivid time period and location in her novel Song of Solomon. Her character Milkman goes on a quest of discovery, uncovering many unknown truths about himself and about his own family, and she ends with him leaping from a cliff and into the air, becoming part of the legend that his family is based upon.
Waterland's ending can be easily seen as a suicide as Swift leaves no other option open to Dick's character. Prior to the suicide dive, Tom Crick confronts Dick with two major shocks to his life. One that his father is also his grandfather, and that Tom is the father of the baby Dick assumed was his. Swift has Tom stating that Dick, "Wants releasing"(Swift 318), as if Dick sees no logical conclusion besides his death. Dick, Swift also writes, has had his experience congealed around him into imprisoning solidity. There is no way out for this poor character, and so Swift ends the one way that he can, with Dick's suicide. Dick is a `potato head' and there is literally no other life available to him eve...
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...is family, and while at first he simply assumes that they are folklore, his gradually accepts the fact that perhaps his ancestors could fly, and perhaps he himself can fly, rejecting any thoughts of suicide or revenge in his mind.
These authors create exits for characters, which flow seamlessly with the preceding storylines. The concluding scenes of these novels, while similar in the suicide theme are worlds apart when viewed through direct evidence of the characters actual feelings and past. It is interesting to note that both are basically suicides, but one becomes a clear suicide while the other becomes a liberating jump into family heritage. By using evidence written in specifically for the readers, both of these authors make it very clear how their endings should be understood, so that finally all ends well, understood.
In Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, the character of Milkman gradually learns to respect and to listen to women. This essay will examine Milkman's transformation from boy to man.
All stories have the same blueprint structure with the same type of ending whether it be good triumphs over evil, rags to riches, the voyage and the return, tragedy, or rebirth. The thing that sets these stories apart is the message they intend to in our minds. “ The power of a story to shift and show itself to anew is part of what attracts people to it, at different ages, in different moods, with different concerns” (Auxier 7). These messages are given by the characters in the story that all have their own reasoning but in the end have one meaning behind it. Some messages give specified personal messages rather than a broad stated such as the stories The Wizard of Oz and The Great Gatsby. Blinded by the ignorance of desires, the characters
The book called Song of Solomon, by Toni Morrison, deals with many real life issues, most of which are illustrated by the relationships between different family members.
Throughout literature it has been common for authors to use allusions to complement recurrent motifs in their work. In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon, Milkman learns that his desire to fly has been passed down to him from his ancestor Solomon. As Milkman is figuring out the puzzle of his ancestry, he realizes that when Solomon tried to take his youngest son, Jake, flying with him, he dropped him and Jake never arrived with his father to their destination.
The idea of complete independence and indifference to the surrounding world, symbolized by flying, stands as a prominent concept throughout Toni Morrison's novel Song of Solomon. However, the main character Milkman feels that this freedom lies beyond his reach; he cannot escape the demands of his family and feel fulfilled at the same time. As Milkman's best friend Guitar says through the novel, "Everybody wants a black man's life," a statement Milkman easily relates to while seeking escape from his sheltered life at home. Although none of the characters in the story successfully take control of Milkman's life and future, many make aggressive attempts to do so including his best friend Guitar who, ironically, sympathizes with Milkman's situation, his frustrated cousin Hagar, and most markedly his father, Macon Dead.
McKay, Nellie, editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, G.K. Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Solomon. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Rigney, Barbara.
Hiding from those who would find him and carry out the wrath of vengeance upon him, the protagonist plans his escape. About to dive in the rancid water and swim for it, a body in the shallows abruptly stops him. The bloated and decomposing corpse pulls the narrator back from his adrenaline-induced frenzy. After a few moments, he settles and reflects, “I thought about him, fog on the lake, insects chirring eerily, and felt the tug of fear, felt the darkness opening up inside me like a set of jaws. Who was he, I wondered, this victim of time and circumstance bobbing sorrowfully in the lake at my back” (193). The narrator can almost envision himself as the man whose corpse is before him. Both deceased from mysterious causes, involved in shady activities, and left to rot in the stagnant lake water, and never to be discovered by the outside world. This marks the point where the main character is the closest he has ever been to death. Although he makes it out alive, the protagonist and his outlook on life are forever changed.
In Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison, men discover themselves through flight. While the motif of flight is liberating for men, it has negative consequences for women. Commonly, the women of Song of Solomon are abandoned by men, both physically and emotionally. Many times they suffer as a result as an abandonment, but there are exceptions in which women can pick themselves up or are undisturbed. Morrison explores in Song of Solomon the abandonment of women by men.
...is past, as well as the mistakes of the people in his community. Milkman fights the oppression much like his great grandfather does by rising above it, and by soaring over his own oppression. Since he used a non-violent stance I felt this could represent Martin Luther King Jr. who helped African Americans to rise above oppression as well. Although he doesn’t bring a change of masses, Milkman himself has changed, and through time he can show others how to ride the wind. Milkman helps to show that flying does not have to be seen as a physical action, but as an ability an individual has to make a life away from oppression, in a world that oppresses many. An individual flying in the novel is seen as a victory over all the obstacles one has to hurdle in life. It’s the character of the individual that determines whether or not you surrender to the wind and fly, or if you stay on the Earth wondering why things never change.
Milkman is born on the day that Mr. Smith kills himself trying to fly; Milkman as a child wanted to fly until he found out that people could not. When he found, "that only birds and airplanes could fly&emdash;he lost all interest in himself" (9). The novel Song of Solomon is about an African American man nicknamed Milkman. This novel, by Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison was first published in 1977, shows a great deal of the African American culture, and the discrimination within their culture at the time Song of Solomon takes place. In part one, the setting is in a North Carolina town in the 30's and 40's.
Toni Morrison's novel “Song of Solomon" is an evident example of literary work that utilizes the plight of the African-American community to develop an in-depth and complex storyline and plot. Not only does Toni Morrison use specific historical figures as references for her own characters, she also makes use of biblical figures, and mythological Greek gods and goddesses. When evaluating Toni Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” you can relate each and every character to a specific historical figure or mythological being in history. But to focus on a specific character you would look towards one of the protagonists. Guitar and Milkman can serve as main individuals that can be symbolic of other political and civil rights activist involved in history.
Freedom is heavily sought after and symbolized by flight with prominent themes of materialism, classism, and racism throughout Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon. The characters Milkman and Macon Dead represent these themes as Macon raises Milkman based on his own belief that ownership of people and wealth will give an individual freedom. Milkman grows up taking this idea as a way to personally obtain freedom while also coming to difficult terms with the racism and privilege that comes with these ideas and how they affect family and African Americans, and a way to use it as a search for an individual 's true self. Through the novel, Morrison shows that both set themselves in a state of mental imprisonment to these materials
Any visitor to the French Riviera in the mid-1920s, the setting of F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, would describe Dr. Richard Diver as a charming, respected, well-mannered physician. Dick is a noble man who has dedicated his life to the health and protection of his beloved wife without thought to himself. Furthermore, he gives wonderful parties and is a reliable source of help to any friend in need. In fact, "to be included in Dick Diver's world for a while was a remarkable experience" (Fitzgerald, Tender, 27).
Toni Morrison juxtaposes Ruth Foster and Pilate Dead, in Song of Solomon, to highlight the separate roles they play in the protagonist Milkman’s journey.
...it up to each reader to draw their own conclusions and search their own feelings. At the false climax, the reader was surprised to learn that the quite, well-liked, polite, little convent girl was colored. Now the reader had to evaluate how the forces within their society might have driven such an innocent to commit suicide.