The Massacre In The Convent And Exclusionism In The Black Community

Toni Morrison (1931- ) is an American writer with international reputation. Paradise, one of Morrison's representative books, reveals her concern about the history of the American black. Morrison creates two fictional communities in the novel: an exclusionary all-black community of Haven and Ruby and a female community of the Convent near Ruby. The two communities' histories help to develop the novel's basic theme of the destructive impact of exclusionism on the black community. The presentation of the fictional history in Paradise is closely related to Morrison's employment of several narrative techniques. Accordingly, the thesis discusses Paradise's theme of exclusionism, in combination with the analysis of the fictional history and its related narrative techniques.Firstly, the thesis examines the novel's major massacre event that nine armed Ruby men kill five innocent and unarmed Convent women. This event serves as a clear manifestation of destructive effects of exclusionism in the black community, and it is also the narrative center of the novel. The massacre event occupies a large proportion of the novel's textual space and functions as the center of discourse time; it is also the center of the novel's structure and contributes to establishing a coherent structure for what seems to be highly distorted and confusing time sequence. Secondly, the thesis attempts to identify the fundamental causes of the massacre from cultural and social aspects. "The Disallowing" event, playing a crucial role in Haven and Ruby's cultural memory, decides the cultural root of exclusionism in both Haven and Ruby. Morrison's repeating narration of "the Disallowing" event draws the readers' attention to the importance of this event. The social root of the black community lies in the development of exclusionism in the history of Haven and Ruby. Morrison provides double versions of the history by employing both reliable and unreliable narrators, so as to reveal the truth about the social roots of the black community.Thirdly, the thesis discovers that the immediate cause of the massacre lies in two communities' increasing conflicts provoked by exclusionism. Morrison deliberately juxtaposes an exclusionary and patriarchal community with a female community of allowance and makes them contradictory with each other in three major aspects. Two communities' discrepancies and conflicts are mainly embodied in the personal experiences of Ruby's four residents. Morrison's employment of polyphony in relating the four residents' experiences helps to present two communities' conflicts and Ruby's exclusionism from different perspectives.To sum up, through the masterly use of four narrative techniques, Morrison successfully establishes the massacre in the convent as the major event of the novel, and that, by exploring its root causes and immediate cause, the destructive effects of the exclusionism practiced by the black community are understood.