Narrative Violence in Toni Morrison’s Jazz

Abstract

This essay looks at forms of narrative violence and their ramifications in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. It outlines violence by highlighting its importance as one of the common ingredients in the art of storytelling and history of American
literature, focusing on Morrison’s Jazz and how theorists like Rene Girard respond to the mechanism of violence. The essay investigates the role of the elusive third-person omniscient narrator who is the source of narrative violence in Jazz. Morrison’s construction of the narrator in Jazz subverts Roland Barthes’ concept of a gradual decline in the narrative authority of the author or the narrator by demonstrating how the narrator can be a misleading or unreliable source of information. For example, the narrator predicts many things in the novel which fail to occur. This essay contends that the kind of epistemological authority and power which the narrator exercises over the lives of characters as well as the expectations of the reader are invasive. If a narrator, as in Jazz, calls upon the readers to imagine a story and its projected ending from the authoritarian perspective of the narrator without allowing the reader to engage his own imagination or critical faculties, it will render the experience of reading any novel or text a by-product of epistemological or narrative violence. The essay concludes by offering an alternative version of epistemology in which the characters evolve along with the reader and the narrator by way of achieving a greater epistemological agency and awareness.

Keywords: Narration, Violence, Touch, Epiphany, Subjectivity