The Historical View In Toni Morrison's Trilogy

Toni Morrison,who was awarded Nobel Prize for literature in1993,is considered as one of the most outstanding novelists on the literary stage in the contemporary world.As an African American female writer,Morrison mainly focuses her attention on the life of the Black and writes a series of novels.In her writing,Morrison attaches importance to African American's history.Undoubtedly,her works are deeply rooted in the history of Blacks and she devotes to describing the life of the ordinary black People.Besides,as a black female writer with strong black consciousness,Morrison has always devoted herself to viewing the true history of blacks and finding the feasible liberation for their plight.This thesis aims to reread Toni Morrison's three seemingly different novels,Beloved(1987),Jazz(1992)and Paradise(1998)as a historiographical trilogy.Though Morrison herself has addressed her Beloved,Jazz and Paradise as a trilogy,there still has been a curious critical silence in the research of her trilogy.The most obvious inter-textual linkage among these three novels lies in their interrelated time frame and setting.Morrison's historicizing trilogy aims to invite her readers to bear witness that all attempts to construe the past are interpretive.Morrison's trilogy is also her first collection showing that she is clearly engaged in investigating the interrelationship between the matters of history and reality.Morrison's trilogy is oppositional to the grand narrative of American history.In the textual body of Morrison's trilogy,the silence of black American history is outlined and the embodiment of her outlawed characters are re-memoried in black historical texts.Furthermore,while reclaiming the silenced black history,Morrison asserts her authority as a black woman writer through her literary techniques.Her participatory reading repositions her readers as ideal narrative readers,and uncovers the monolithic grand narrative.Her narratives unravel the contradiction and discontinuities in the grand narrative.And in the crevices which result from the grand narrative's self-contradiction and discontinuities,Morrison makes the voiceless heard.Morrison's mastery of narrative,and her literary accomplishments are redrawing the boundary of American history as well as white-supremacist literary history.This thesis consists of five chapters.The first chapter introduces Toni Morrison and her trilogy briefly,and then presents the literature review of Morrison's works and the framework of the thesis.Chapter Two focuses,by way of Beloved,on the reexamination of the ideologies of racial and sexual difference grounded in the silenced history of slavery and its aftermath.The investigation of the historical matters continues in the textual analysis of Jazz in Chapter Three.It also focuses on Morrison's approach to narrative freedom at the same time.In Chapter Four,a textual analysis of Paradise,the possibility of a new paradise for black people will be the important point.The last chapter summarizes what Morrison wants to declare in her trilogy.By declaring those stories that have not been spoken,Morrison wants to prove that escape and silence could not improve the current situation.Life needs a release,especially those painful souls.Only by viewing history can black people move towards the future.