earticle

영어

Toni Morrison`s Jazz is a novel similar to jazz and blues. In this novel, Morrison uses several narrative strategies such as the structures and rhythms of jazz and blues, the call and response pattern of black church and a questionable narrator. By doing so, she makes this novel a "speakerly text". Henry Louis Gates Jr., in his Signifying Monkey, explains the meaning of the "speakerly text", According to him, It aspires to the status of orality and wants to resemble the black expressive culture. Morrison, in her interviews, points out the new aspect of her novel. In her viewpoint, black music loses it`s unique status because of commercialization and its multiple participants and audience. She insists that a new mode of novel which can play a healing and leading role for the reader is required. She consistently emphasizes the oral quality of her novel. She calls it "a talking book." Laying emphasis on Morrison`s aim in writing her novel, I adopted Gates Jr.`s "speakerly text" idea to analyse Morrison`s Jazz. According to Gates Jr., the orality in African American novelists` works varies. Gates Jr.`s analyses, from slave narratives to postmodern novels, also include Ishmael Reed`s Mumbo Jumbo. In doing so, he has found out the special oral quality of African American works. Jazz deals with the tripartite relationship between Joe, Dorcas, and Violet. Joe falls in love with young Dorcas, who reminds him of his mother, and in the end has to murder Dorcas in his confused feelings. The questionable narrator of this novel, "I", almost narrates this novel. With her narrative, readers travel the journey of the characters` traumatic past and present. To heal the trauma of the characters, Morrison uses special narrative techniques such as black music and call and response patterns. Each chapter of this novel starts and ends with reference words. In this way, she makes her novel "a music score" or jazz-like novel. The main aim of these narrative strategies is to make her readers participate in reading itself and reevaluate the true meaning of this novel; that is, give the readers multiple perspectives. As for her characters and the narrative, she makes them first confront their traumatic status and then renew themselves by dialogic relationship and self-interrogation. Morrison suggests the power of laughing and multiple standards of judgment by using her therapeutic narratives. At the end of this novel, the trio of Joe, Dorcas and Violet is replaced by the trio of Joe, Felice and Violet. At this time, there is no bloody or hopeless situation. Those, including the narrator, who suffer from their traumatic past, memory and incorrect judgment, become whole by remembering the lost value of their ancestors, and by being orchestrated by Morrison`s dialogic narrative strategies.