Tar Baby: Style 1 key example

Throughout Tar Baby, Morrison often crafts long scenes of dialogue between two or more characters before returning to third-person narration. For example, in Chapter 1, Valerian and Margaret argue over their complex relationship with their children: a conversation that continues for nearly 10 pages without a break in dialogue. From this stylistic choice, readers gain access to characters' developed voices rather than the narrators' third-person view of their voices.

Of course, Morrison provides Tar Baby with extended moments of narration without dialogue, a stylistic choice that develops key parts of the novel like setting and historical context. In these moments of narration, Morrison also develops her poetic and highly symbolic prose—a hallmark of her writing style. Her style reflects the nature of storytelling, specifically storytelling in oral traditions. Due to various societal and environmental factors, historical storytelling is often fragmented. In Tar Baby, Morrison explores how fragments of history can weave themselves together to form new stories. These histories—like violent centuries of European colonialism and American race relations—are grounded in reality. However, Morrison elevates their presence in Tar Baby through her postmodernist style of writing.