Construction, Deconstruction And Reconstruction Of"Home" In Toni Morrison’s Novel Home

Born in1931, Toni Morrison is the first female African-American novelist who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Up to date, Morrison has had a total of10novels published. The success of her first novel Song of Solomon and the sensation produced by Beloved guaranteed her status and fame in the American literary circle and brought her numerous trophies. Rich in black cultural and traditional connotations, Morrison’s works are consistently concerned with the fate of the black race and the living state of black people in contemporary American society. Artistically, her novels are characterised by exuberant imagination and magical realism. Her narrating style is distinctive and the language is poetic and musical as well as profoundly beautiful.Home is the latest novel debuting in2012. It tells the story of two protagonists-the brother Frank and sister Cee who went through migration, home-escaping and home-returning in different stages of their lifetime. Still as children, Frank’s family was driven out of their original home to a new land, on which they had to endure years of hard work around the clock and living on sufferance before they could build up their own home. When Frank and Cee were in their youth, they felt a strong eager to escape from their home and they both succeeded through different ways. However, in the foreign lands far away from home, the cruelty of war, and the deceit and inhuman treatment of white people rendered the two gravely traumatized both in body and soul. In the end, Frank took her sister back home and was able to recover from trauma and rebuild their home with the deep concern and hearty help from folks in the same community.In the context of Morrison’s previous works, the thesis takes the novel Home as its major focus of study, attempting to probe into the protagonists’understanding of "home" at different life periods from the angles of construction, deconstruction and reconstruction of home. It is concluded that the distinct plot about "home-returning" is a conspicuous innovation made on the basis of similar themes in her past novels. The "escape-return" pattern of the younger generation facilitates their reconstruction of the lost home. Such an innovation in her newest novel acts as the representation of new thinking on the theme of "home" in a contemporary background, and also effectively expresses the long-held "home complex" of the entire black group.