Theme of Flight in the Song of Songs Clearly, the significant silences and stunning absences in Morrison's lyrics become profoundly political as well as stylistically crucial. Morrison describes his own work as containing "holes and spaces for the reader to enter" (Tate 125), reflecting his rejection of theories that privilege the author over the reader. Morrison disdains such hierarchies in which the reader as a participant in the text is ignored: "My writing expects, requires participatory reading, and I think that's what literature should do. It's not just about telling the story; it's about to involve the reader". ...we (you, the reader, and I, the author) come together to make this book, to have this experience" (Tate 125). But Morrison also indicates in each of his novels that the images of zero, of The absence, of chosen and imposed silence, are ideologically and politically revealing. Morrison's male characters... imagine themselves on the run and are almost all in love with airplanes. ... In the tradition of black literature starting from Native Son by Richard Wright, however, the privilege of flight, at least on airplanes, is mostly reserved for white boys. Black males, in Morrison, fly only metaphorically, and only with the assistance and inspiration of black women , in his aptly titled book “When Lindbergh Sleeps with Bessie Smith,” “escape is a function of the black woman’s evocation and not the black man’s industrial initiative” (105). opens with the image of an escape attempt, when Robert Smith, ironically an agent for the Mutual Life Insurance company of North Carolina, promises to "take off from Mercy and fly away on my own wings" (3). Pilate (P...... middle of paper...... style and in an attempt to diminish linearity as a value.) It would be worse than useless, for example, to talk about "plot development" in Morrison's book novels ; there is a plot, certainly, but its revelation culminates or evolves through a process of compiling multiple points of view, variety of interpretations of events (and some of these contradictory), through repetition and reiteration. Just as there is no "climax", in the usual sense of the term, so there is no resolution, no series of events that can be appropriately labeled "beginning, middle, end". Works Cited: McKay, Nellie, editor, Critical Essays on Toni Morrison, GK Hall, 1988. Morrison, Toni. Song of Songs. New York: Penguin Books, 1987. Rigney, Barbara Hill. The Voices of Toni Morrison, Ohio State University Press: Columbus, 1991.Tate, C., ed. Black women writers at work, continuum, 1986.