Comparison between Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon and William Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom
Ryan Sullivan
5/10/2008
Professor Lyne
MWF 8:30
Song of Solomon and Absalom, Absalom! There has been a lot of ink spilled on the comparison’s between Toni Morrison’s novels and William Faulkner’s novels and justifiably so. Both have written stories about Americans dealing with the American problem of race relations. Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” are two such novels that contain many similar elements. Both novels are about young men or relatively young men (Milkman is 31 when he begins his quest) who try to put together a family’s past. The novels also share certain similarities between certain characters and in narrative structure, but within these similarities come differences that separate the authors from each other. The differences stem from their perspective on what the legacy of the American South should be. The most striking similarity in the two novels is the characters Clytie from “Absalom, Absalom!” and Circe from “Song of Solomon”. Clytie is the result of Thomas Sutpen’s affair with one of his slaves and her place is the runner of the Sutpen household. “Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to not like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild: half-untamed black, half Sutpen blood: and if ‘untamed’ be synonymous with ‘wild’, then ‘Sutpen’ is the silent unsleeping viciousness of the tamer’s lash)…” (AA pg 126)
Circe was the midwife for the town of Dannville and she ran the household for the Butler family until they all died. “Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”(SoS pg 243) She is described by Milkman as “…the face so old it could not be alive, but because of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old
5/10/2008
Professor Lyne
MWF 8:30
Song of Solomon and Absalom, Absalom! There has been a lot of ink spilled on the comparison’s between Toni Morrison’s novels and William Faulkner’s novels and justifiably so. Both have written stories about Americans dealing with the American problem of race relations. Morrison’s “Song of Solomon” and Faulkner’s “Absalom, Absalom!” are two such novels that contain many similar elements. Both novels are about young men or relatively young men (Milkman is 31 when he begins his quest) who try to put together a family’s past. The novels also share certain similarities between certain characters and in narrative structure, but within these similarities come differences that separate the authors from each other. The differences stem from their perspective on what the legacy of the American South should be. The most striking similarity in the two novels is the characters Clytie from “Absalom, Absalom!” and Circe from “Song of Solomon”. Clytie is the result of Thomas Sutpen’s affair with one of his slaves and her place is the runner of the Sutpen household. “Clytie, not inept, anything but inept: perverse inscrutable and paradox: free, yet incapable of freedom who had never once called herself a slave, holding fidelity to not like the indolent and solitary wolf or bear (yes, wild: half-untamed black, half Sutpen blood: and if ‘untamed’ be synonymous with ‘wild’, then ‘Sutpen’ is the silent unsleeping viciousness of the tamer’s lash)…” (AA pg 126)
Circe was the midwife for the town of Dannville and she ran the household for the Butler family until they all died. “Birthed just about everybody in the county, I did. Never lost one either. Never lost nobody but your mother. Well grandmother, I guess she was. Now I birth dogs.”(SoS pg 243) She is described by Milkman as “…the face so old it could not be alive, but because of the toothless mouth came the strong, mellifluent voice of a twenty-year-old