Morrison and Atwood and Krauss, Oh My!

While reading, I came across this passage that instantly reminded me of two novels I recently finished, Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon. I couldn't wait until my next post to share this with you, so I figured I'd do a quick one now specifically dedicated to it.

"When I was born my mother named me after every girl in a book my father gave her called The History of Love. She named my brother Emanuel Chaim after the Jewish historian Emanuel Ringelblum, who buried milk cans filled with testimony in the Warsaw Ghetto, and the Jewish cellist Emanuel Feuermann, who was one of the great musical prodigies of the twentieth century, and also the Jewish writer of genius Isaac Emmanuilovich Babel, and her uncle Chaim, who was a joker, a real clown, made everyone laugh like crazy, and who died by the Nazis. But my brother refused to answer to it. When people asked his name, he made something up. He went through fifteen or twenty names. For a month he referred to himself in the third person as Mr. Fruit. On his sixth birthday he took a running leap out of a second-floor window and tried to fly. He broke his arm and got a permanent scar on his forehead, but from then on nobody ever called him anything but Bird."  (Krauss 35)

First off, here is a little background on those two novels. In The Handmaid's Tale, the Handmaid's are named according to who they belong to.The main characters name, for example, is Offred, like "Of Fred," because Fred is the man who has her. In this way, names establish a sense of identity for the characters. Similarly, in Song of Solomon, character's names range from Guitar to Sing to Solomon. Each one has a different story behind how it came to be and provides deeper understanding of each character. This passage from The History of Love echoes this recurrent element from both stories. It reveals how Alma, Emanuel, and Bird got their names, and ultimately develops a sense of identity for each character.

This wasn't the first time in the book that naming was referenced either. This leads me to believe it may develop into a theme or motif. We saw naming back when Leo wrote his on the limousine window. We also saw it when Bird started to write his name "in chalk across our front door, across his class photograph, on the bathroom wall, and.... carved it with [Alma's] Swiss Army knife as high as he could reach on the tree in front of [their] house" (37). In this way, names are used as a means of being seen and remembered.

Another way this passage reminded me of Song of Solomon was through the character of Bird. In Toni Morrison's novel, flight is a motif used throughout as a symbol of independence and freedom. When I read how Bird tried to fly, I flashed back to reading about how Robert Smith tried to fly off Mercy Hospital in the opening scene. Maybe this is just a coincidental similarity. Maybe I am reading too much into it, and he is just a kid who wanted to see if he could fly. However, I couldn't write off the possibility that this could be meaningful and reveal more about Bird's character.

Time will tell, and I will check back in soon to hopefully provide answers to these questions. In the meantime, if you too found yourself amazed by the parallels, don't be shy to comment with your thoughts and ideas! :)