The Quest for and Discovery of Identity in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Abstract In Her First Three Novels, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1973), and SonB of Solomon (1977), Toni Morrison explores the interplay between self-knowledge and social role. Her characters, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, inhabit a world where inhospitable social assumptions obtain. But Morrison does not provide her people with the option of living underground, in isolation, beyond community. Those whom social relations exclude (like Pecola Breedlove of The Bluest Eye or Sula) lack self-knowledge and are destroyed by themselves or by others. My analysis here centers on Son9 of Solo11Wn, the only one of Morrison’s novels in which her protagonist completes successfully his or her search for psychological autonomy. Yet, no discussion of the search for identity in Son9 of Solomon would be complete without some mention of Morrison’s two earlier novels. The structure and thematic concerns of these two works establish a framework in terms of which we may understand the meaning and status of Milkman’s discovery.