The Melody Of Eternal Re-echoing

American literature has profound religious background. The biblical resources flow in many American literary works. Toni Morrison, a black woman writer subject to the cultural background, makes use of the biblical resources in her own unique way.Three principal themes coming from the Holy Bible go through Morrison's works: the lost paradise, tribulation and the prodigal son. The sin shown under the balance of God's moral standard in the Old Testament and the hope of salvation after Christ's befalling in the New Testament appear alternately in Morrison's novels, which represents two kinds of consciousness embodied in both the Old Testament and the New Testament.In her works, Morrison employs a lot of character archetypes, character relationship modes, plotting modes and images from the Bible so as to look for parallels between the Bible and her novels.As far as the application of the Bible is concerned, Morrison not only simulates the contents of the Bible but also its form. Besides, she cuts the complex meaning endowed with the characters and allusions from the Bible, extracts one of them and then puts it into specific circumstances. The method of extracting part of its meaning from archetypes and then putting into certain works leads to the striking contrast between subjective intention and objective effect while Morrison uses biblical allusions. What's more, when reading Morrison's novels, we can experience accumulation of her apprehension of the Bible. She also puts her personal apprehension of the Bible into her novels. Thus each of characters, numbers, images and stories in the Bible becomes a kind of individual life experience. In the antithesis of her novels and the Bible, Morrison adds rich historical and cultural meanings to her characters and stories, which turns her individual experience into universal emotion of human beings and also makes her novels surmount the South as well as the United States. In this way, her novels are endowed with epic grandness because they represent the history and the present of human beings. Anyway, Morrison is trying to imitate the eternity of the Bible with her humble effort.