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Tone
Chapter 6
Explanation and Analysis—The Narrator:
The narrator is one of the most complex elements of Jazz. Though she structures and delivers nearly the whole narrative, readers never have access to her real identity. Over the course of the work, she reflects on narration, imagination, and interpretation and evolves from overly gossipy to someone who recognizes that people are "original, complicated, changeable—human." While she is explicitly "unreliable," Morrison in fact uses her as a way to demonstrate that all single perspectives and interpretations are, to some degree, unreliable.
A few instances demonstrate this unreliability particularly well. In Chapter 6, the narrator is in the midst of recounting the story of Golden Gray bringing Wild to his father's cabin when she abruptly restarts the story from the beginning:
The owner of the house might return, or the liquid black woman might wake or die or give birth or...
When he stopped the buggy, got out to tie the horse and walk back through the rain, perhaps it was because the awful-looking thing lying in the weeds was everything he was not as well as a proper protection against and anodyne to what he believed his father to be, and therefore (if it could just be contained, identified)—himself.
At the ellipsis in this passage, one version of Golden Gray's story trails off and, so to speak, the narrator tries again. In the second telling, she is more attuned to Golden Gray's own interiority, and particularly to the issue of his paternity, which involves but also extends beyond his biracial identity. This willingness to restart a narrative to do more justice to characters demonstrates the narrator's awareness of the way stories convey underlying values.
Later in Chapter 6, the narrator reflects on this awareness:
What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughing grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.
In this passage, the narrator bemoans the difficulty of accurately characterizing and empathizing with Golden Gray. Even her second try at narrating his story has been insufficient because it fails to recognize that he "longed for authenticity": that, on top of everything else, his is also simply a young man who has grown up without a father and is now meeting him for the first time. Once again, Golden Gray is more complex than the narrator expected; this lesson causes the narrator to call herself "unreliable."
By the end of the book, the narrator has learned that unreliability is an unavoidable characteristic of singular perspectives and interpretations of the world. In her final words, she declares:
Say 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.
This sentence is a recognition that interpretation, here likened to reading, is always an act of "making" and "remaking." Reading and narration are both modes of interpreting the world: they develop a structure of feeling that necessarily means they are, to some degree, unreliable. But this fact also validates Morrison's project of crafting her novel from a patchwork of perspectives, not only the narrator's. Perhaps the only reliable narrator, Morrison seems to argue, is a communal one.
Chapter 10
Explanation and Analysis—The Narrator:
The narrator is one of the most complex elements of Jazz. Though she structures and delivers nearly the whole narrative, readers never have access to her real identity. Over the course of the work, she reflects on narration, imagination, and interpretation and evolves from overly gossipy to someone who recognizes that people are "original, complicated, changeable—human." While she is explicitly "unreliable," Morrison in fact uses her as a way to demonstrate that all single perspectives and interpretations are, to some degree, unreliable.
A few instances demonstrate this unreliability particularly well. In Chapter 6, the narrator is in the midst of recounting the story of Golden Gray bringing Wild to his father's cabin when she abruptly restarts the story from the beginning:
The owner of the house might return, or the liquid black woman might wake or die or give birth or...
When he stopped the buggy, got out to tie the horse and walk back through the rain, perhaps it was because the awful-looking thing lying in the weeds was everything he was not as well as a proper protection against and anodyne to what he believed his father to be, and therefore (if it could just be contained, identified)—himself.
At the ellipsis in this passage, one version of Golden Gray's story trails off and, so to speak, the narrator tries again. In the second telling, she is more attuned to Golden Gray's own interiority, and particularly to the issue of his paternity, which involves but also extends beyond his biracial identity. This willingness to restart a narrative to do more justice to characters demonstrates the narrator's awareness of the way stories convey underlying values.
Later in Chapter 6, the narrator reflects on this awareness:
What was I thinking of? How could I have imagined him so poorly? Not noticed the hurt that was not linked to the color of his skin, or the blood that beat beneath it. But to some other thing that longed for authenticity, for a right to be in this place, effortlessly without needing to acquire a false face, a laughing grin, a talking posture. I have been careless and stupid and it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am.
In this passage, the narrator bemoans the difficulty of accurately characterizing and empathizing with Golden Gray. Even her second try at narrating his story has been insufficient because it fails to recognize that he "longed for authenticity": that, on top of everything else, his is also simply a young man who has grown up without a father and is now meeting him for the first time. Once again, Golden Gray is more complex than the narrator expected; this lesson causes the narrator to call herself "unreliable."
By the end of the book, the narrator has learned that unreliability is an unavoidable characteristic of singular perspectives and interpretations of the world. In her final words, she declares:
Say 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.
This sentence is a recognition that interpretation, here likened to reading, is always an act of "making" and "remaking." Reading and narration are both modes of interpreting the world: they develop a structure of feeling that necessarily means they are, to some degree, unreliable. But this fact also validates Morrison's project of crafting her novel from a patchwork of perspectives, not only the narrator's. Perhaps the only reliable narrator, Morrison seems to argue, is a communal one.
