Figuring In, Figuring Out: Narration and Negotiation in Toni Morrison's Jazz
2003; Ohio State University Press; Volume: 11; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/nar.2003.0012
ISSN1538-974X
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoAt the end of Jazz the narrator tells us that she had believed "life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure. . . . I don't believe that anymore. Something is missing there. Something rogue. Something else you have to figure in before you can figure it out" (227-28). With these words she affirms the transitory nature of understanding, narration, and judgment as something that cannot occur outside a participation in ("figuring in") subjective interplay. This denial of the existence of an objective narrative space, and situating of the text within the broader signifying play of the world, links the performative and constative functions of Jazz, so that the closing words of the novel are an imagined injunction to, and declaration of, freedom: "[I'd s]ay make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now" (229). As has been pointed out by Michal Peled Ginsburg and Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, at this stage of the novel the narrator's voice seems close to that of Toni Morrison herself. Moreover the "you," for the first time in the text, refers to the reader—or if one prefers, a narratee with no difference from the real reader.
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