An Existential Approach To Toni Morrison’s Home

Toni Morrison was the first African-American woman writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Her works, which have met a warm welcome amongst literature critics, focus mainly on African-American people’s lives and the oppression they have suffered. In1970, she published her first novel The Bluest Eyes. On May8th,2012, she published her tenth novel, Home, when she was eighty-one years old. The story is about the ultimate choice that the African-American people, who were represented by a veteran named Frank, had made after experiencing all kinds of miseries. Like her previous literary works, Toni Morrison pays great attention to the destinies of African-American people. The sufferings of the main characters in the novel also reflect the subject of existentialism.Existentialism has played a crucial role in French ideological circles. Jean-Paul Sartre, a French ideologist, created a precedent for modern existentialism. The essence of existentialism is freedom, which pays great attention to the choices people have made when they were in a crisis. The concepts of alienation, absurdity and freedom of choice will be adopted in the thesis to interpret the novel so as to deeply understand the oppression African-American people have endured, how they have survived from the crisis, and how to make choices when facing crisis. The thesis is to care about African-American people’s living state and to awaken people’s reconsideration towards racial issues. Therefore, it offers a new angle for studying Toni Morrison and the creation of her ideology.This thesis contains four subdivisions:Chapter One first introduces Toni Morrison’s life experience, her literary works and the plot of her new novel Home. Then relevant research on Toni Morrison by literary critics between home and abroad will be discussed.Chapter Two mainly discusses the relation between Toni Morrison and existentialism. The social background of the emergence of existentialism and the main concepts of Jean-Paul Sartre’s existentialism will be introduced. Several main concepts of existentialism, including existence precedes essence, alienation, absurdity, and freedom of choice, are dealt with in detail.Chapter Three mainly analyzes Toni Morrison’s Home with the concepts of alienation, absurdity and freedom of choice in existentialism. The living state of African-American people, who were the victims of racism, is explored.Chapter Four is the conclusion part of the thesis, which summarizes the analysis in the previous chapters. As a female African-American writer, Toni Morrison has been paying close attention to the living state of African-American people, which happens to share;a similar theme with existentialism. Existentialism focuses on man’s problem of existence during the crisis and explores man’s ultimate choice living in this absurd world. In Home, Toni Morrison explored African-American people’s problems of existence and gave us her conclusion that African-American people could get their real sense of belonging only by returning to the Black community.