Hagar

1. FACT: The relative ease with which Hagar lives makes her different from both Reba and Pilate.
2. Hagar is the recognition of the loss that African-American women feel when, for whatever reason, their men leave them in the cycle of the “American experience.”
3. In the search for identity, an individual finds that their worth in their community is equivalent to the worth inside oneself. Hagar’s mission is to make a place of worth for herself within “her home”—Milkman.
4. “It was as though she held her breath and could not let it go until the energy and busyness culminated in a beauty that would dazzle him” (Morrison 313). “Hagar was energized by the details of her mission…. She could not get his love (and the possibility that he did not think of her at all was intolerable), so she settled for his fear” (Morrison 128).
5. Hagar's desperation to have Milkman love her turns her quest for love into an obsession with Milkman and also an obsession with being able to control him, and pushes her into madness.
6. Hagar is simple in that she only wants one thing in her life. Of course it is a basic element of plot to want something you cannot have, as she wants and cannot have Milkman. However, when I read the end of Hagar's part in the story, I wondered why Pilate didn't save her, because it seemed to me that she would have been able to.