Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon: A Paragon of Trauma Fiction

Morrison’s Song of Solomon could be viewed as a paragon of trauma fiction. Since no narrative of trauma can be told in a linear way, Morrison tries to depict the overwhelming power of trauma through a non-linear narrative, episodic delivery, and flashbacks. Accordingly, the readers are compelled to concoct the disjointed and fragmented memories in order to solve the riddle of the text, in which past, present, and future are intermingled. Morrison’s Song of Solomon is bound up with psychoanalytic formulation. The figuration of trauma in the ghost extremely resembles Freud’s assertion about the return of the repressed traumatic past. Morrison’s narrative clearly depicts the belated experience of trauma through resurrecting the ghosts of slavery. The analytical-qualitative scrutiny of Morrison’s Song of Solomon not only corroborates the characters’ traumatic experiences but also demonstrates the techniques Morrison employs in order to implicitly depict the trauma of slavery and its after-effects in its hypotext.