Model
Digital Document
Publisher
Florida Atlantic University
Description
Toni Morrison’s later novels Love and Home bring forth an issue of identity
anxiety for those involved in the narrative: author, narrators, and readers. Featuring both
first-person and third-person narrators, these works offer conflicting narratives in which
the writer, Morrison, allows her characters to question her own authorial voice. Greater
agency is given to the first-person narrators through which they deconstruct the
traditional objectivity of third-person narratives. As such, this thesis argues, the structures
of Love and Home extend their inside conversations to the real world of readers who must
reconsider where their narrative trust has been. Moreover, Morrison’s challenge to her
authorial voice becomes the means through which she questions the hegemony of U.S.
historical narratives. In the end, it is the subjective voices of the first-person narrators
which offer a more reliable, counter narrative of not only Morrison’s fictional stories, but
that of the nation’s historical past.
anxiety for those involved in the narrative: author, narrators, and readers. Featuring both
first-person and third-person narrators, these works offer conflicting narratives in which
the writer, Morrison, allows her characters to question her own authorial voice. Greater
agency is given to the first-person narrators through which they deconstruct the
traditional objectivity of third-person narratives. As such, this thesis argues, the structures
of Love and Home extend their inside conversations to the real world of readers who must
reconsider where their narrative trust has been. Moreover, Morrison’s challenge to her
authorial voice becomes the means through which she questions the hegemony of U.S.
historical narratives. In the end, it is the subjective voices of the first-person narrators
which offer a more reliable, counter narrative of not only Morrison’s fictional stories, but
that of the nation’s historical past.
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