A Cycle of Love and Violence

For me, the color red represents Toni Morrison’s book, Song of Solomon, as I associate the color with love and violence, two opposite extremes that Morrison intertwines in her novel. Throughout the novel, many of the characters live surrounded by violence due to love or a lack of love. As characters fall in love, sorrow and death seem to quickly follow and few characters find their happily-ever-after. Hagar, a girl obsessed with Milkman, attempts to kill him so no one else can have him. Milkman complains that she “wants me chained to her bed or dead” and views her as a nuisance, failing to understand the depth of her love for him (222). Hagar later dies alone after a nervous breakdown over her unrequited love. Hagar seeks love but uses forcefulness when she fails, while Guitar uses love as an excuse for his cruel nature. He claims love motivate him in order to justify his violence against whites and states that he loves black so much that he will risk his life to kill whites in order to protect blacks (223). Milkman and Guitar soon become enemies as Guitar’s distrust of his friend grows until he vows to kill Milkman for supposedly betraying him. Their once brotherly love causes them to divulge secrets in each other that lead to jealously and suspicions as ambition overcomes their friendship. The novel ends with them fighting and the implication that one of their lives will end with “one of them...killing his brother” (337). Through a novel filled with such despair, Morrison demonstrates why people must look beyond temporary emotions to see reason so that they do not act irrationally and live to regret it.