Song of Solomon doesn’t remind me of The Stranger in many ways, but there was one situation in which it did: Milkman’s passivity towards things in chapters ten, eleven, and twelve started to bug me in just the same way that Meursault’s passivity did. He is so ambivalent towards other characters, and doesn’t seem to realize how his actions affect others. He doesn’t realize how he has insulted the people in Solomon’s bar, but he has, and he gets beaten up because of it. He never asks anyone how they are, but only cares about himself.
The major point of passivity, in my mind, is when Guitar tries to kill him. I talked about this in our discussion today, and it seemed like not a lot of people agreed with me, but when I read the scene in the woods during the hunt, I was so frustrated that he only felt sad that it was Guitar who was going to kill him. I understand that he had had a while to get used to it, and that when you go back and read other key points in dialogues between him and Guitar there are some hints that Guitar is capable of killing Milkman, however, I would still have been shocked had I been Milkman.
If it were me in his place, I would have been terrified, to start with, and then I would have wanted to know exactly why Guitar was trying to kill me. I probably would have panicked, but it’s a good thing that Milkman showed maturity, as Joey said in class. Since he grows up a little bit in this moment where he’s about to die, he is able to relax, and that is how he gets out of the bad situation relatively unscathed and, at the very least, alive.
I’m not exactly sure of my point in this post, but it’s just my observation that his only emotion upon learning that he was going to die was sadness. I suppose, in a way, this led to his “rebirth” since, now that he’s still alive, he’s able to confront Guitar and fix all of the things that he has definitely screwed up with everyone he has ever met.
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