Postmodern Narrative In Toni Morrison's Jazz

Postmodernism is talked and written about everywhere in contemporary westernsociety. But the concept of it is ambiguous and is not yet widely understood. Manypostmodern writers try to experiment with some innovative narrative skills, which arerather different from the traditional ones, to reflect their thoughts towards reality. TheNoble Prize winner, Toni Morrison, is one of them. In her sixth novel she usespostmodern narrative techniques to tell the story. This thesis is intended to provide hercreative narrative interpretation and to explore her great concern aboutAfrican-American people and their culture. The thesis consists of six parts. The introduction presents an overview of ToniMorrison's life and her literary achievement. At the same time it gives a briefsummary of the story of Jazz and points out that Jazz belongs to the postmodern novelgenre because of its unique postmodern narrative skills. Chapter one provides adefinition of postmodernism and explores three main expressive methods ofpostmodern narratives, which will be analyzed in the chapters that follow. Then itsums up the characteristics of postmodern narratives. Chapter two focuses onnarrative ambiguity in Jazz. It is composed of two parts: narrator's ambiguity and thechange of reader's role. Instead of telling one continuous story from beginning to end,Morrison tells the story once, then details a part of that story with a new narrator andeventually repeats the process again. Therefore, the narrator is an ambiguous one whocan't provide the reader with a clear and believable story so that reader has to changehis role from passive accepting to active thinking. Chapter three analyzes thepostmodern narrative of Jazz from the perspective of parody. Morrison parodies theconventional narrative pattern, the circular narrative pattern, and the traditional happyending to show her originality in postmodern narrative. On one hand, she makes hernarration look like the traditional one. On the other hand, by doing so, she aims tocriticize the traditional narrative pattern, which cannot adequately reflect postmodernreality. Chapter four discusses the meta-fictional skill of Jazz. Morrison does not usethe actual historical material as the background of the story, but emphasizes the factthat she cooks up the narrator and characters on purpose. At the end of the novel, shemakes comments on traditional narrative methods. Meanwhile, she talks about theprocess and aim of her writing. The conclusion is a summary of the thesis and arestatement of the main points of its argument. And it attempts to give an appropriatereview of Toni Morrison's literary accomplishment.Toni Morrison is no doubt a great female writer, a person who pursues perfection.She tries to describe the world through her eyes in a unique way. As anAfrican-American writer, she has done her best to protect African-American folklore,has actively used her influence to defend the role of the artist and has encouraged thepublication of works by other black writers.