Toni Morrison's Magic Realism Novel Art

Beginning with the birth of magic realism, and its influence and development, this thesis focuses on analyzing wholly novel artistry, narrative characteristics and writing techniques in Toni Morrison's novels. Morrison endows her characters with bizarre names and features by adopting the rhetorics of magic realism: exaggeration, absurdity, symbolism and allusion. She makes her roles mirror each other by the composite description. Owing to the impact of black folklores and religious legends, Morrison's narration is characterized by narrative plurality-in-unity and fragmentation, circular or spiral plot, accumulation of meanings. Readers are invited to participate and interpret text actively. Morrison borrows elaborately multiple improvisatory performance from jazz and applies the technique to her novels. She also draws parallel montage from movie and uses it in her writing.