In chapter 11 we encountered the hunting scene where Milkman becomes a man. This is probably my favorite chapter we have read so far in this course and one of my favorite chapters I have encountered in literature. I am so proud of Milkman hear and I feel vindicated finally for liking him throughout the whole book even though he was a self-centered jerk.
Throughout the whole book, I have been struggling with frustration regarding the character of Milkman. He is so self-centered and even smug about his selfishness that I keep wanting to give him a stern talking to. Make him care about other people, even just a little bit. Make him engage with life and with the people around him instead of deflecting responsibility and maturity. Make him live for something better than short term pleasure. I have been wanting him to do this since the start of the book, but he never really does until this chapter.
The first good sign is when he decides to go on the hunt. "Even if he could have come up with a way to get out of the hunt, he wouldn't have taken it...He had stopped evading things, sliding through,over, and around difficulties." Then he goes off to the woods and is left in the dark with only his thoughts and he can't escape them. "Apparently he thought he deserved only to be loved--at a distance, though--and given what he wanted. And in return he would be ... what? Pleasant? Generous? Maybe all he was really saying was: I am not responsible for your pain; share your happiness with me but not your unhappiness."
These are very good thoughts for Milkman to have and I expect to see a humbled, kinder, more mature Milkman in the future. We can already start to see it. He is fine with being the butt of the jokes when he lies about dropping the gun. Old Milkman's pride would never have allowed this. He is able to earn there respect where he couldn't before.
Song of Solomon works very well as a coming-of-age novel, which I think is why I love the personal revelation scene so much. This is the turning point where Milkman stops acting like a selfish teenager and finally grows up at the ripe old age of 32. I was thinking back to the books we read in the Coming of Age class last year, and for the books I most enjoyed the personal revelation scene stands out very clearly in my mind. In Catcher it was Holden taking his sister to the playground and sitting out in the rain. In Black Swan Green he smashed the expensive calculator. In Portrait he is standing above a beach when he receives his calling. For some reason, this image of someone throwing off their immaturity and accepting their manhood (or womanhood) is an incredible powerful one. This hunting sequence was a very powerful image to me while reading this book.
I agree--and I've sometimes considered adding _Song_ to the CoA syllabus for this reason (not that there's a lot of wiggle room there, since I had to *cut* one book last year!). Milkman alone in the dark in the woods fits right in there with the other iconic moments of characters being "tested" in some significant way that you've listed. (And the flying motif would be very interesting to examine alongside the Daedalus motif in _Portrait_--see Tommy's blog ("20th Century Novel") for a discussion of Daedalus as a reference point in Morrison's novel.)
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