A Mercy

by

Toni Morrison

Florens’s Shoes

Throughout the book, various narrators pay attention to Florens’s shoes. Florens gets her first pair of shoes, a pair of D’Ortega’s wife’s broken heels, in Maryland. Florens’s mother tells her they are impractical…

read analysis of Florens’s Shoes

Jacob’s House

In A Mercy, Jacob’s quest to acquire enough wealth to build an enormous, opulent house becomes an obsession around which the rest of the characters and the plot revolve. Jacob’s desire for a…

read analysis of Jacob’s House

Orphans

Throughout A Mercy, Morrison brings up the concept of orphans, referring to many of her characters as such. As a child, Jacob was an orphan, making him especially sympathetic to other people who seem…

read analysis of Orphans