A Literary Analysis of Jazz by Toni Morrison Essay

The novel Jazz by Toni Morrison is an extremely well writtenaccount of black life during the mid 1850's to the late 1920's. Morrisonmanipulates the three main character's personas while analyzing theirlives to show the effect that a person's history has on their present daylife. The most interesting thing I found concerning this novel has theway in which Toni Morrison was able to present you with a first impressionof the characters, then proceed through history, to give you a newconception of their character. This is seen through three importantindividuals Violet, Joe, and Dorcas. At the beginning, Violet is depictedas crazy and foolish, but through the interpretation of her history, aclearer picture of a woman in love is presented. At first, Joe is seen asa man without standards who is simply a cheating husband who kills hisgirlfriend, but this also is abolished when the extenuating circumstancesof his history are described. Dorcas plays the role of the piteous,innocent woman who is stuck in the middle of this crisis at the beginning,but is relieved of this generalized characterization through her actionstowards Joe and her search for self-satisfaction. Even though the historythat is recounted in this novel is more gossip than fact, it presents amore accurate story than the one depicted in the offical story located atthe beginning of the novel. Toni Morrison attempts, through these threecharacters to illustrate how the narrator's perception of each character'shistory can alter the reader's understanding of a character's actions.Through this technique, she is able to demonstrate that circumstances andevents are not always as simple or truthful as they seem. The first impression of Violet is presented through the"official story" established at the beginning of the novel. Her characteris seen as the crazy, jealous wife who went to the funeral of herhusband's girlfriend to cut the girl's "dead face" (1). She is depicted ascrazy because she has conversations with Joe's dead girlfriend, Dorcas, inher head and obsesses over the girl's features (Morrison...

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