Impact Of Childhood Trauma In Toni Morrison's Song Of Solomon

An Irrevocable Impact In the novel Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison stresses the impact of a sole childhood trauma on a character’s entire course of action, as well as the constant theme that surrounds it. She proves through extensive development of Macon Dead, Guitar Bains, and eventually Circe that a single event can provide a lens through which these characters view the world around them, and in turn influence every decision they make. Guitar’s life is guided by the tragedy of his father’s death, instilling in him a hatred for white people, which he disguises as a love for his own people. As he describes the horror of not only his father’s accident, but also the way it was handled, Guitar’s passion for vengeance emerges. It quite literally sickens him to taste candy, therefore taste the painful memory, and this anger manifests itself in his hatred for anyone but his own people. After Guitar admits to being a member of the Seven Days, Milkman exclaims, “But now you’re doing what the worst of them do” (157). To which Guitar responds by justifying his hateful actions with love. He states, “What I’m doing ain’t about hating white people. It’s about loving us… My whole life is …show more content…
The bearing of this event is shown directly in Macon’s desire to own property and things. He teaches Milkman to “Own things. And let the things you own own other things” (55), to value material items in order to gain power. But, as Milkman comes to realize, “He loved these things to excess because he loved his father to excess” (300). Milkman eventually grasps that his father’s manner and purpose in life is simply “a measure of his loss at his father’s death” (300), a grudge from the past that he never let go of. Macon lives the way he thinks his father would have wanted him to, ruining his own life and the lives of those around him by valuing material possessions over human