Change

        When you first meet someone, your first impressions of that person are crucial to your perceptions of his or her character and personality. We are encouraged to make a strong first impression in job interviews and college interviews, as we may influence the interviewer to subconsciously rate us higher. We tend to give our first impressions of someone far too much importance, even though we realize that first impressions are often misleading. We always should remember that other people can act differently from how we expect them to behave.

        When Milkman explains to Guitar that he helped an old man load a crate out of common courtesy, Guitar automatically assumes Milkman is lying to him about shipping the gold to Virginia. Even Milkman realizes how his explanation “sounded like a lie,” as he had been criticized for his “selfishness and indifference” on multiple occasions. Milkman is recognizing how his personality is fundamentally changing; he is becoming a more selfless and genuine person. He even realizes how he was wrong to exploited others, such as how he completely disregarded Hagar and other characters as actual people.

        However, in the novel, people’s reputations and perceptions of each other are permanent and static. For example, many of the characters’ names are reflections of their past that no longer pertain to their personalities and behaviors. Milkman’s nickname no longer makes sense for him, but it remains because people are unable to move on from their first impressions of him. Guitar also was named for a rather trivial event in which he could not play a guitar he wanted to play as a child. Guitar also continues to think of sugar as a reminder of the white people who tried to console him after his father’s death, never considering how sugar could have a different and more positive meaning for others. Even though she is encouraged by Guitar to move on from her relationship with Milkman, Hagar never moves on, eventually committing suicide due to her depression and feelings of worthlessness.

        Milkman’s change is all the more profound because most of the other characters remain static despite having many blatant flaws. Milkman almost rises above the other characters as the only one to truly grow and develop over the course of the novel. However, the fact that the other characters are unable to overcome their flaws shows how difficult it can be to alter habits and lifestyles. Their communities will continue to be plagued by hardships as long as the characters live on with their faults and refuse to act selflessly with each other.

The Degradation of the Dead Family

When Milkman goes searching for gold and meets Reverend Cooper and the rest of Montour County, the community has fond memories of Macon Jr., remembering that he “was strong as an ox … outran, outplowed, outshot, outpicked, outrode them all.” Milkman realizes that their description of his father is vastly different from the uncompromising man his father has become. On the surface, Macon Jr.’s current social standing and lifestyle are right in line with the successes of his father: Macon Jr. drives a Packard and has married the daughter of a doctor, while the original Macon developed an expansive farm from scratch. However, as Milkman knows, Macon Jr. is drastically different from the original Macon due to the motivations behind their actions. Macon Jr. blindly pursues wealth with little regard for the welfare of the community, striking fear in others. The original Macon served as an inspirational figure for his community, referring to them as his “brothers”.

Initially, I thought one of the messages in the book was that material wealth and morality are mutually exclusive. The characters who are wealthy, such as Macon Jr. and Milkman, are harsh and manipulative, corrupted by their desire for gold and material wealth. On the other hand, Pilate is wise and genuinely helps people through their troubles, yet she is poor. Macon Jr. and Pilate are both socially isolated because the community dislikes how ruthlessly Macon Jr. collects taxes and how Pilate does not have a belly button, labeling her as “unnatural”. The original Macon, however, becomes wealthy and successful in a morally sound way. The original Macon wins the respect of Montour County through hard work and sacrifice, serving as a role model for the rest of the community. Perhaps the original Macon is such an inspirational figure for Montour County because he is a farmer just like the others; he continues to maintain his roots in agriculture and embraces his identity as an African American. He tries to stand up to the white farmers rather than emulate white people, like Macon Jr.

I think a reason for Macon Jr.’s greed for wealth is that he continues to be traumatized by his father’s death. While Pilate willingly shares her past with others, Macon Jr. mainly keeps the past bottled up, only retelling it to Milkman on rare circumstances. Macon Jr. possibly believes that by becoming as ruthless and cold-hearted like the white farmers, he can prevent something like his father’s murder from happening to himself. Macon Jr.’s quest for wealth, however, is worth nothing as long as he endures a dysfunctional family life and social standing. Hopefully, Milkman’s visit to his past will help him reconcile with his family, allowing them to live a peaceful life just as the Deads once did.

Past vs. Present

        In many of the novels we have read in class, there has been a common motif about the connections between the past and the present. We first examined this motif in The Things They Carried, as O’Brien and the surviving soldiers continue to “carry” their emotional trauma from the Vietnam War long after it is over, continuously reliving their past. In Maus, Vladek faces a slightly different situation; he is a direct victim of the violence rather than simply a soldier who experiences it. Vladek is unable to move on from the survivor’s guilt of managing to survive the concentration camps where many of his families members perished. Similarly, the soldiers in The Things They Carried also face survivor’s guilt, wondering how they managed to survive the war when someone as morally and intellectually sound as Kiowa did not. More interestingly, in Maus, trauma is transferred to future generations who do not have any direct experiences of the conflict. Art develops an obsession with Auschwitz and the Nazis due to his father’s constant grief and trauma from his past, despite any meaningful connections with his Jewish identity.

       The characters in Song of Solomon are greatly influenced by their past. Milkman’s “concentration on things behind him” is “becoming a habit” even when he is just four years old and does not have much of a personal past to reflect on; rather, he develops an obsession with his family’s past. Macon Jr.’s fixation on the past is revealed when he names his son Macon III, a continuation of the family tradition of naming the son after the father. This tradition is a reflection of the family’s past as slaves: the children are treated as the father’s property, branded with the father’s name just as slaves were branded by the names of their owners. The Dead family also remains fragmented just as many slave families were separated when family members were auctioned off to different owners. While slave auctions drove slave families apart physically, the Dead family is emotionally detached. Macon Jr. owns a Packard and is respected for his material wealth by the rest of the black community. On the other hand, Pilate is “helpful to everybody” and finds happiness in living simply. Macon Jr. and Milkman’s pursuit of wealth and social status draws parallels to the actions of the white people in society, whereas Pilate has more traditional values, singing songs about the Sugarman that are similar to the uplifting songs that slaves sang in the field.

       In today’s society, we don’t seem to worry about our past. We are all worried about our future: college admissions, internships, jobs, and so on. The past seems so different from our current situation, and we simply have so many goals for our future. Hopefully, when we do eventually look back at the past, we will look back at it fondly and be fulfilled.

The Great Gatsby from a Historical Perspective

The Great Gatsby portrays many aspects of American society in a negative light. The wealthy in society are portrayed as immoral and superficial; Gatsby conspires with suspicious characters like Meyer Wolfsheim and gains wealth through bootlegging and other illegal activities. People “guessed at [Gatsby’s] corruption” and believed in his “incorruptible dream”, revealing an inherent distrust of the wealthy. However, there are many examples of people in the early 1900s who earned their wealth through sincere hard work and innovation. Around the turn of the 20^th century, Andrew Carnegie was the prime example of the self-made man. Raised in a poor Scottish family, Carnegie found success in America by investing in steel technologies and the railways. Unlike the wealthy in The Great Gatsby, Carnegie found value in giving back to the poor and the rest of society, writing articles like “The Gospel of Wealth” to emphasize how it was a great responsibility for the wealthy to share their wealth for the greater good of society. Carnegie also founded Carnegie Mellon University and many libraries to emphasize the importance of knowledge in the industrial age.

Fitzgerald also criticizes the American dream, commenting on its superficiality. Perhaps the American dream truly seemed superficial during the 1920s; after the devastating World War, people possibly were losing faith in a society with rampant crime and financial instability. However, there were some events in the 1920s that suggested that the American dream was becoming more of a reality than ever before. Women’s suffrage in 1920 was a major victory for activists and it granted greater equalities for women. Women also began to have a greater role in the workforce. Today, many of us are either related to immigrants or are immigrants ourselves. We might not think of our current lifestyle as ideal, or the “American dream”, but we enjoy countless comforts and luxuries that we would not have in other countries. The American dream really is just a matter of perspective. Our current situation may in fact be the dream for someone else. By keeping our dreams in perspective, we can find greater fulfillment from our future dreams when we do eventually fulfill them.