Below the Roots

Currently, I'm on the longest, most annoying journey ever! This journey will take me to India, where I'll be attending my cousin’s wedding. It's crazy to think how modern technology is allowing me to connect with my family that lives almost 8,000 miles away. It allows me to talk to them on a daily basis and to travel quite frequently across the globe. If I imagine a time where such facilities were unable, I don't believe I would be as close to my family as I am now. Take a look at Milkman from Song of Solomon. He is on a quest to understand his familial connections and his own past. However, he faces many complications and obstacles during this journey. He has no technology to connect with people and to make his search easier. On the other hand, I could simply use websites such as Ancestry. com and quickly find the information I'm looking for. His only way is to blindly travel to places he has heard of from stories told by his father or Pilate, hoping he w...

     There is a saying, with age comes wisdom, and this idea is repeatedly shown in Song of Solomon. Most of his life, Milkman has lacked the knowledge of his family’s past and his connections to them. This is represented by the uneven lengths of his feet. As he grew older, he was presented with more facts; this is why his shorter foot “looked just as long as the other” (Morrison). The ideology that with age comes wisdom is widely accepted in society today. However, I believe something a little different. I believe that knowledge is achieved through experiences rather than time. Many people believe with age comes wisdom, but how true is that? Well, not very true. In reality, with experience comes wisdom. In other words, the more experiences you encounter the more knowledge you are bound to obtain. By experiences, I mean encountering something new, something out of ordinary, or something odd. Well to make this clearer, let me give you an example. Ima...

Imagine a society where no one has a name. How would this even work? Would we just walk around blindly talking to people? How would we know who we were even talking to? Or who was even talking to us? Would we even know if the conversation was targeted to us or someone else? How would we get the attention of someone? This would create so much confusion, and I certainly wouldn’t want to live in such a world. A name not only gives someone an identity but also gives an individual a personality and a reputation. There are times where we try to live up to our names. And times where we try to run away from them. Either way, our names are crucial factors in developing a sense of self and helps drive us in different paths of life. Take a look at Milkman’s grandfather, he was given his name from a “drunken Yankee in the Union Army”(Morrison). This was not his original name, but he decided to keep it. Why? This new name gave him an opportunity to start a new beginning and helped ...

                                Women now work outside of the house. Women now hold higher positions in the work field than they did during the 1990s. Women now practice in the same activities as men, such as football. Women now have the freedom to express themselves. Women now are not afraid to stand up for themselves. However, this was not the case before the 1920s. Women were treated as “house slaves”; in other words, their only responsibility was to take care of the house and nothing else. Women were viewed as inferior to men. Women were not allowed to engage in activists by their will. After the 1920s, laws were passed to give women “equal rights”, but the acceptance of these laws were fairly low. The Great Gatsby, a book many found appealing, highlights the views on feminism as foolish and corrupt. Fitzgerald characterizes the women in the book as “golden”, meaning they are greedy (Fitzgerald). H...