Milkman’s Spatial Identity in Song of Solomon
IOANA RADULESCUABSTRACT. Tony Morrison’s Song of Solomon could be generally regarded as a novel which depicts the story of four generations. But what strikes the reader is the way in which Morrison chooses to present all these four stories into a single one. One may say that they are inevitably connected since the protagonists are all related as parents and sons. I argue that the success of this novel lies in Morrison’s ability to encompass four generations into a single one by turning the protagonist of the novel, Milkman, into a space from which all the other generation strings are tangled. The aim of the article is to analyze the extent to which the protagonist should be rather regarded as a space than as a character, thus challenging the meaning of the two conventional narrative concepts.
Keywords: space; character; ground; hole; catabasis; trauma