The Education of Milkman Dead: The Bildungsroman as Aesthetic Cycle in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon

Rational critique of one’s existential condition and questions of why, where, when, who, what dominate Morrison’s Song of Solomon. As she clearly shows in the novel, it is in finding answers to these questions that one is better able to deal with one’s existential condition and, where necessary, to make the transition from fragmentation to wholeness as a subject dealing with the history and experience of a racial formation that renders one either as an object or inferior other. In Song, the site of the exploration of these questions is the familial space and the marginal public constituted by black America, through which their unheard voices are given full play. Straddling the various familial spaces and marginal public is the novel’s protagonist, Milkman Dead, whose growth away from a selfish, materialistic young man Morrison tells magically as a bildungsroman, textual revision, and aesthetic cycle.