Abigail Saenger- Literary Critique
The woman who were’nt natural born
1. Pilate has no navel, and is therefore feared by those around her.
2. Pilate’s place in society is essential and paradoxical to her connections to her paste, present, and future.
3. Pilate is the archetype of the medicine woman, living an almost hermit life and never at the center of society. She was also orphaned, and then afterwards separated from her brother, her closest living relation. Through the separation, however, she became more in touch with Macon’s past, through a postmortem relationship with her father, connecting her more deeply with Macon’s root and core, as well as her own.
4.
“Clear as day, her father said, ‘Sing. Sing,’ and later he leaned in at the window and said, ‘You can’t just fly off and leave a body.’
Pilate understood all of what he had told her (. . .) she knew he was telling her to go back to Pennsylvania and collect what was left of the man she and Macon had murdered. (The fact that she had struck no blow was irrelevant. She was part of her brother’s act, because, then, she and he were one)” (Morrison, 147).
5. Macon connects to people in a superficial way, by controlling their futures; Pilate connects to people in a real way, by knowing their pasts.
6. Pilate can never be fully understood as a character unless every one of her actions is taken together, which makes for confusing interpretation. Her role for Milkman, especially in Part II, is to provide a path into the family past. She gave him clues; the song she sang Hagar to sleep with tied the stories and pieces of stories together for Milkman. An interesting humanity is her mistaking her father's words for an order, rather than her mother's name. She connects past and present and future.
The woman who were’nt natural born
1. Pilate has no navel, and is therefore feared by those around her.
2. Pilate’s place in society is essential and paradoxical to her connections to her paste, present, and future.
3. Pilate is the archetype of the medicine woman, living an almost hermit life and never at the center of society. She was also orphaned, and then afterwards separated from her brother, her closest living relation. Through the separation, however, she became more in touch with Macon’s past, through a postmortem relationship with her father, connecting her more deeply with Macon’s root and core, as well as her own.
4.
“Clear as day, her father said, ‘Sing. Sing,’ and later he leaned in at the window and said, ‘You can’t just fly off and leave a body.’
Pilate understood all of what he had told her (. . .) she knew he was telling her to go back to Pennsylvania and collect what was left of the man she and Macon had murdered. (The fact that she had struck no blow was irrelevant. She was part of her brother’s act, because, then, she and he were one)” (Morrison, 147).
5. Macon connects to people in a superficial way, by controlling their futures; Pilate connects to people in a real way, by knowing their pasts.
6. Pilate can never be fully understood as a character unless every one of her actions is taken together, which makes for confusing interpretation. Her role for Milkman, especially in Part II, is to provide a path into the family past. She gave him clues; the song she sang Hagar to sleep with tied the stories and pieces of stories together for Milkman. An interesting humanity is her mistaking her father's words for an order, rather than her mother's name. She connects past and present and future.
