Jazz Toni Morrison

Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations. Toni Morrison Biography Jazz Questions and Answers The Question and Answer section for Jazz is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz takes place during what is known as the Jazz Age, in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, as you can tell through the vivid use of language and diction. The main characters Violet and Joe, a fifty-year-old couple, suffers major strains on their relationship when Joe has an affair with an eighteen-year-old girl named Dorcas, and then ends up killing because he fears he might lose her. Even with Joe cheating on his wife, Violet and Joe attempt to continue their relationship, though both are unhappy.

As mentioned earlier, Jazz is set in 1926. Throughout the book, Toni Morrison is able to deliver subtle hints about the time period in ways no other author is able to do. An example of the historical context represented in Toni Morrison’s novel is when she refers to the fashion of the time “Voilet would dress her hair for for her the way the girls wore it now: short, bangs paper sharp above the eyebrows? Ear curls? Razor-thin part on the side? Hair sliding into careful waves marcelled to a T.”(page 108). I find that historical citations are one of the major ingredients Toni Morrison uses in her recipe for writing a story.

Toni Morrison’s Jazz, published by Alfred A. Knopf in 1992, is the sixth of her ten novels to date and, some scholars believe, is the second in her series on love. Arguably, among her most experimental novels, Morrison’s musically titled book is not focused primarily. The main characters of Jazz novel are Joe Trace, Violet 'Violent' Trace. The book has been awarded with Booker Prize, Edgar Awards and many others. One of the Best Works of Toni Morrison. Published in multiple languages including English, consists of 229 pages and is available in Paperback format for offline reading. Jan 17, 2021 Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations.

While the systematic study of the structure and development of language in general or of particular languages and the careful organization of writing so that it is written in a successful and effective way are essential for an author’s style, sentence structure is also an extremely important element to include in the process, I find Toni Morrison does well at formating her sentence structure . She includes a wide variety of different types of sentences, which I feel makes her writing much more fluid.

In addition, Morrison draws the reader’s attention by manipulating sentence length and wording to express the tone or emotion she is trying to convey. This is exemplified through the brief statements that appear in Jazz when Violet is violently reflecting on her husband’s affair: “One man. One defenseless girl. Death” (Jazz 73), Morrison demonstrates her skill in sentence usage very often throughout her works, and the quality of these sentences reflects her overall skill as an author.

To be honest when I was first reading this book I didn’t understand why it didn’t follow any particular structure and why Toni Morrison had structured the novel the way she did but someone explained to me about how they understood Toni Morrison’s novel and they described how Morrison’s novel was a literary interpretation of a jazz song. I wish that I had come up with their conclusion but the way they told me was “Morrison’s creative use of grammar was like the dis-chords of the jazz piano. Her confusing sentence structure was like the ever changing time signature from the drums and the piano coming in just that little bit after the off beat. The long unexplained side-plots are like improvised saxophone solos that do what they like and break all the rules. Morrison said that the “reader didn’t need to see it so much as feel what it was like” (Morrison 1993) and that is exactly what I understood the double bass player to be doing as he closed his eyes without a second glance at his sheet music and let the notes run in and out of his soul.”

In conclusion there are numerous components that add up to form an author’s style. A few recognizable traits of Morrison’s work include the use of similes and creative analogies, excerpts from history to make the stories legitimate, and diverse sentence structure. All of these aspects combine to make Toni Morrison’s complex and intricate novels what they are today. This author’s distinctive style is what has made her so legendary and prominent in the literary world.

Works Cited

Ciment, James. End of world war 1 to the great crash. Abingdon, Routledge, 2015. This book gives incite on the Jazz age, the period after world war 1 to the great crash, it tells the history of this time and its people. I’m using this book to research a possible question I want to write my argument about which is, Would the story exist if it were written in a different time and place? I’m starting to read more into the jazz age to look a what the environment African Americans lived in at this time.

Jazz Toni Morrison Genre

Gillespie, Carmen. Critical Companion to Toni Morrison. E-book, New York, 2008. Facts on File library of American literature, Facts on File library of American literature.. -Critical companion to Toni Morrison [electronic resource] : a literary reference to her life and work.

-Presents a biography of Nobel Prize-winning American writer Toni Morrison, features synopses and critical assessments of her novels, children’s books, nonfiction books, essays, interviews, speeches, and cinematic, theatrical, musical, poetic, and dance productions, and discusses related people, places, and topics.

Narrator in jazz toni morrison

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York, Knopf, 1992. In the winter of 1926, when everyone everywhere sees nothing but good things ahead. Joe trace, a middle age waiter who moonlights as a door to door salesman of cleopatra beauty products, shoots his teenage lover to death. at a funeral, joe’s wife, violet, attracts the girls corpse. this passionate, profound story of love and obsession by nobel prize laureate toni morrison brings us back and forth in time as a narrative is assembled from the emotions, hopes, fears, and deep realities of black urban life.

Toni Morrison. Edited by Harold Bloom, e-book, New York, 2011. Bloom’s modern critical views, Bloom’s modern critical views. Presents eleven essays on the concepts and texts of African-American female writer Toni Morrison, and includes a chronology and a bibliography.

Symbols

Symbols can prove to be highly effective when it comes to literature. Toni Morrison is highly symbolic in her works, and she uses symbols generously to convey meanings that add more depth to her novels. Morrison is generally contingent on symbols and makes them fairly obvious for the reader to detect. She picks a symbol, or many, and threads it throughout the entire novel, which creates countless connections, and sometimes her novels share the same—or similar—symbols as well. This can be exemplified through three of Morrison’s works: Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Jazz, wherein characters’ names, the respective titles, and key objects play highly symbolic roles. By providing deeper examination of these novels, it will be clear the immense importance of symbols in Morrison’s literature.

Jazz Toni Morrison Ending

One creative way in which Toni Morrison makes use of symbols is through her choice of character names, which reigns true in all of her novels. For example, in Song of Solomon, she gives several characters names with a biblical reference—like Pilate, Solomon, Reba, Hagar, and Ruth—to give those characters more depth and connect them to a well-known figure. Morrison also gives characters deliberate names that parallel their personalities. Such can be seen in The Bluest Eye with the character Soaphead Church: “Church” refers to the fact that he was possibly a former “guest preacher” and “Soaphead” refers to not only his personality, which is “intricate, symmetrical, balanced, and tightly constructed” (The Bluest Eye 166), but also implies the fact that he needs to “wash” his brain of the dirty thoughts he has of little girls. Yet another way Morrison takes advantage of the power of names is by altering the name to change its meaning, such as in Jazz. In this novel, the character Violet is introduced as having good intentions and is considered more as a “flower,” but as the plot thickens, she becomes known as “the woman people call ‘Violent’…because she had tried to kill what lay in a coffin” (Jazz 79). Clearly, Morrison demonstrates the importance of symbols by creating great meaning through the use simple use of a name.

Another way that Morrison creates meaningful literature is through her effective use of her novels’ titles. For each of her works, she makes sure to choose an appropriate title that symbolizes some aspect of the novel, and she then heavily weaves that symbol into her writing. In Song of Solomon, the title is derived from the Bible and serves as the first of many biblical references, all of which hold great significance and symbolism to the overall plot. Also, Solomon was the great-grandfather of the novel’s protagonist Milkman Dead, and the “song” that the title implies is a song about Solomon leaving his family, a song which plays a crucial role in Milkman’s quest to find his heritage: “Solomon done fly…Solomon gone home” (Song of Solomon 303). Similarly, the title The Bluest Eye also has great significance in that novel. Pecola Breedlove, a little African American girl, finds her appearance repulsive and, therefore, wants to be like what has always been presented to her as “better”: white skin and, namely, blue eyes. This results in the rejection of her own brown eyes and self image. Thus, eyes are constantly mentioned throughout the novel to reinforce the idea that these thoughts are always on Pecola’s mind. Another example of a symbolic title is shown through the role of music in Jazz. This novel is set in 1926, a time when the popularity of jazz music soared. Music is woven into Jazz in many different ways: sometimes it conveys the moods or feeling of various characters, sometimes it is used to set the scene, and sometimes it serves as a reminder of African American culture. Morrison obviously put much thought into the titles she chose for her works, and they added significance and complexity to each plot.

Jazz Toni Morrison Plot

Some of Morrison’s main symbols are simple objects, and she relies heavily on these symbols to express inner-meaning; thus she incorporates them often to remind the reader of their significance. For instance, there are many occasions in Song of Solomon when Lena and Corinthians are associated with artificial roses, which symbolize the pathetic and sad lives they are forced to lead due to their social class and family situation: “[they are] unfit for any work other than the making of red velvet roses” (Song of Solomon 187). Thus, instead of explaining these circumstances every time the girls appear, Morrison simply replaces that by mentioning the artificial roses, and all is implied. Yet another example of Morrison’s use of objects appears in The Bluest Eye when Claudia MacTeer receives a white, blue-eyed baby doll for Christmas. The doll represents the fact that society puts the “perfect” appearance of whites on a pedestal, and this nine year-old black girl, Claudia, is beginning to learn how to deal with ideals such as this. In addition, in her novel Jazz, Morrison uses different types of birds to symbolize separate meanings. For example, Violet has a caged parrot that says “I love you,” and there is significance in her action of releasing it, and there are also red-wing birds that represent freedom in a different context. Of course, there are several other objects that Morrison emphasizes, and it is all of these objects that communicate the deeper meanings of her texts.

Jazz Toni Morrison Sparknotes

Undoubtedly Morrison has mastered the ability to effectively use symbols in her writing. Through aspects such as character names, titles of her novels, and important objects, she has found a way to insert symbolic meaning into even the smallest amount of words. It takes a good author to explain the elements of his or her work, but it takes a great author to write abstractly and leave the reader thinking about what it all meant.