The Importance of Flight in the Song of Solomon Flight is one of the main themes of Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. “Flight echoes throughout the story as a reward, as a hoped-for skill, as escape, and as proof of intrinsic worth; however, in the end, this proposition is not so clear” (Ljubljano 96). The Song of Songs ends with the "escape", but in such a way that the act lends itself to multiple interpretations: suicide; "real" flight and then a wheel attack against the "brother"; or a "real" escape and then some sort of encounter with his brother's (perhaps) murderous weapons. The fact that Guitar places his rifle on the ground doesn't make him any less deadly: his smile and gun toss both precede the language of "kill guns" - and his "my man - my main man" is a echo of the same irony that allowed Guitar to call Milkman his friend even after his previous attempt to kill him (Middleton 298). And Guitar's arms are killing, not just because they want to meet the challenge posed by Milkman's approach to him, but because they are the arms that have killed, that have killed white people, that can kill anyone who isn't black, or anyone Guitar manages to convince himself that he is not black: like Pilate. In other words, Guitar can make “other” anyone who crosses the boundaries of the definitions he constructs for the group he claims to love: black people. What Guitar has built in his life is a category of political figures that does not allow for the existence of the idiosyncratic Pilate or the existence of the individually apolitical Milkman. Milkman's journey to escape is a journey into his past; his future is behind him. The text's refutation of the idea of ​​a total and serene self is thus crystallized in... the middle of the paper... it is Pilate who represents not only history incarnate but the praxis that derives from the recognition of the effects of history, the will to theorize about the possibilities in the face of history and the ability to create concrete alternatives to personal and public injustices. Staying on the ground of history, then, is a labor of love. Works Cited: Middleton, David. The Fiction of Toni Morrison: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland, 1997. Morrison, Toni. Song of Songs. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Ljubljano, Wahneema. "The Postmodernist Rag: Political Identity and the Vernacular in Song of Solomon," in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon," in New Essays on Song of Solomon, edited by Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press 1995, 93-116, 111- 113: Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997.