Purpose

Dustin Breitner

Throughout Meridian’s life, she is consumed with finding her purpose and identity. In the passage Gold, Meridian, at an early age, finds a passion through her gold. Walker states “She took her bar of gold and filled all the rust off it until it shone like a huge tooth. She put it in a shoebox and buried it under the magnolia tree that grew in the yard. About once a week she dug it up to look at it. Then she dug it up and less…until finally she forgot to dig it up. Her mind turned to other things.” (Walker 45) Meridian finds a purpose through her gold but her parents did not encourage it. Therefore, Meridian moves on from her passion in search for a new one.
Meridian continues to search for her purpose in life. The pit, a place where Meridian went to understand her grandmother’s extreme euphoria and her fathers compassion for people, symbolizes one of Meridian’s attempted purposes. Walker states “For Meridian, there was at first a sense of vast isolation. When she raised her eyes to the pit’s rim high above her head she saw the sky as completely round as the bottom of a bowl, and the clouds that drifted slowly over her were like a mass of smoke cupped in downward-slanting palms…she had contact with no other living thing; instead she was surrounded by the dead.” (Walker 52) Meridian finds peace and serenity through her loneliness in the pit. She is searching for her identity. “It seemed to her that it was a way the living sought to expand the consciousness of being alive.” (Walker 53)
Meridian, searching for a purpose, becomes pregnant at a young age. Walker states, “She knew she didn’t want it. But even this was blurred. How could she not want something she was not even sure she was having? Yet she was having it, of course.” (Walker 59) Meridian did not a child because she knew she would have to devote her life to him or her. She did not want her child to be her purpose. In society in order to be a good mother, one must devote their lives to there children. Meridian knew she wanted to do more with her life. Walker states, “lurching toward his crib in the middle of the night is what slavery is like” (Walker 65) Meridian compares being a mother to slavery because she believes a child would be a burden to her life. She rejected this purpose so much that she even had thought of murdering her own child in order to search for a new purpose.
Meridian eventually dedicates her life to the civil rights movement and her lover Truman Held. Walker states “Truman Held…who began to mean something to her…not until one night when first he, then she was arrested for demonstrating outside the local jail, and then beaten.” (Walker 80) Walker sees something in Truman that she has not seen before in anyone. She was touched by his passion for the movement and became involved emotionally with him. Meridian found her purpose through Truman while devoting her life to the movement.

Walker, Alice. Meridian. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976. Print.