An Analysis Of Writing Strategies In Jazz

Toni Morrison, the only African-American female Nobel Prize winner, attaches much importance to technical experiment and never forgets in her works to employ those recognized and culturally endowed writing strategies and narratological means to resolve her dilemma of being a double marginalized black female writer. These writing strategies come to a full reflection in her novel, Jazz.First, Morrison incorporates characteristics of jazz music into her composition of this novel, including call-and-response patterns, improvisations and pause effect. In this way, Morrison intends to imitate the whole text as a piece of jazz performance. This narrative strategy endows the novel with a special quality and enchanting beauty of musical rhythm and requires an awareness on the reader's part to participate in the process of creation of the novel. In this schema, Morrison restores the black oral and cultural tradition as a means to repudiate the dominating white cultural hegemony. On the other hand, Morrison presents a new perspective of conceiving of the history of the African-Americans in the Jazz Age.Second, Morrison contributes to the womanist theory based on quilting by utilizing quilting as a narrative technique to represent black female experiences neglected by the white and black men. Morrison intends from the failure of black females integrating into the urban city to show that only by restoring the value of supportive female network or community while reserving their diversity, can these black females have an integrated personality in the industrialized environment. In this way, Morrison offers an alternative for womanist theory to counteract the prevailing theoretical hegemony imposed by white feminism.Last, the fluid state of the narrator contributes to another distinct writing strategy employed consciously by Morrison. The narrator of Jazz is an unbelievable blend of both omniscient and limited, both reliable and unreliable, both objective and subjective. The narrative voice is part character and part omniscient narrator. This fluid personality of the narrator in Jazz is an overturn of violent hierarchies and binaries proposed by conventions by blending two seemingly contrast qualities.