A Postclassical Narratological Study Of Morrison’s A Mercy

The Afro-American women writer Toni Morrison and her works have graduallybecome focus of criticism during the recent years. In November2008, almost a weekafter Barack Hussein Obama winning the presidential election, Morrison’s new novelA Mercy which was published five years later than her previous work Love (2003)came out and drew attention from both home and abroad immediately. By telling asequence of stories of abandonment and enslavement through different characters indifferent points of view in the novel, Morrison unfolds a picture of the17th-centuryNorth America and people’s living situation on this land as well as shows herunderstanding of race and enslavement: there is no necessary connection between thetwo. In A Mercy, Morrison also leads her readers to make similar or different narrativejudgments of the abandonment event through her repetitions of this core event whichis narrated by different characters. It is this bold try that does not only enable readersto participate in the understanding and creation of the novel, but also makes thetensions among readers, the author, and narrators to change dynamically, whichpushes the development of the narrative progression of the novel. Such is thefascination of Morrison’s mastery narrative skill. This thesis focuses on the artisticfeatures of Morrison’s writing in A Mercy in light of historical and social context ofthe novel, narrative progression and narrative judgments, which belong to thecategories of postclassical narratology.