Chapter One:

Summary:

The novel opens in the black Manhattan neighborhood of Harlem, the year is 1926 and on an ice-cold winter morning, a woman named Violet Trace has thrown open her windows and emptied her birdcages of their flocks, including her favorite, lonely bird that always said "I love you." Violet is a fifty-year-old black woman, she is skinny and emotionally unstable. We learn that she has been living in Harlem for several years, but city life is difficult and the narrator hints that maybe the stresses of Harlem are finally wearing Violet down. On one afternoon, Violet began carelessly wandering the sidewalks and then, for no apparent reason, she sat down in the middle of street, surrounded by a few concerned neighbors. Violet is married and she lives with her husband, Joe Trace, but she is not wealthy as she makes little money as an unlicensed hairdresser, arriving at her clients' residences. Violet is lonely and regrets that she does not have an extensive family to fill the quiet of her apartment‹a quiet that is exacerbated by her ejection of the birds. As Violet thinks about her loneliness and her grandmother down south, she has the sudden urge to build a family. She is convinced that this will breach the gap separates her from her husband.

Violet's effort to build a family is as humorous as it is pathetic and doomed. Walking down the street, she notices a baby buggy and decides to take the child, Philly, for a walk to the corner of the block. Philly has been left unattended because his sister had gone upstairs to retrieve her favorite "Trombone Blues" album. Violet thinks of the child as a source of light that will be potent and salvific enough to repair her marriage. She thinks that she will bring Philly home to Joe but in the farce that ensues on the street, Violet insists that she had no intention of kidnapping the child. After all, she had only walked to the edge of the block and was guarding the child who had been carelessly left unattended.

Later in the chapter we learn of the source of trouble in the Trace marriage. Even though Joe Trace, is a quiet and older man, he has had an affair with a young girl and shot her. The presentation of this fact is bewildering. We later learn that Joe is a cosmetic salesman who was well respected and that there were no legal consequences of his crime. His lover, Dorcas, was a young girl and as if Joe's crime was not enough, Violet arrives at Dorcas' funeral and slashes her face with a knife. As a consequence of this drama, there is a "poisoned silence" in the Trace residence.

Amidst the chaos of individual relationships, the City emerges as omnipotent and glamorous, a force that inspires and controls the courses of the human characters. Below the gaze of the city's skyscrapers, the ghost of Dorcas is haunting the Traces and while the Salem Women's Club was going to help Violet, she has been ostracized because of her inappropriate behavior at the funeral. Wholly detached from the moral commentary and judgment of her peers, Violet embarks upon a search to know everything about Dorcas: she visits Malvonne, whose apartment was used as a "love nest" for Joe Trace and Dorcas. After this, Violet learns the dances and music that Dorcas liked, and she talks to teachers at Ps-89 and JH-139. Dorcas' dignified aunt eventually warms up to Violet and eventually offers her a photograph of the young woman. This photograph is placed in a silver frame and kept on the mantle where Violet and Joe visit nightly, still separated by their silence.

Analysis

"Jazz" is a novel of unnumbered chapters and unknown narrators. The first chapter is divided into two sections that are separated by three dots. In the first section, the narrator is not self-revealing. Her commentary is a brief aside, with the tone of gossip and editorializing. The majority of her paragraphs have a false climax‹syntactic and narrative‹and her narrative ends with a cliffhanger: "Violet invited her in to examine the record and that's how that scandalizing threesome on Lenox Avenue began. What turned out different was whom shot whom." This sentence captures her hyperbole as well as any other.

In the second section, a new gossiping narrator is more sympathetic. She begins her narrative with an ode to "the City" where fighting is necessary for survival. She reveals herself: " I haven't got any muscles," and also admits that she has an old knowledge of life in the neighborhood. Clearly, the narrator is close to the characters of the story. She lives in the same city and is privy to their gossip. The fact that the chapter uses two different speakers is evident in a few subtle points of contrast. The two speakers are in disagreement in regards to time and one focuses the story on post-Dorcas life while the other focuses on pre-Dorcas. The first narrator focuses on the skeletal details in a mere nine paragraphs. She is sensational and each new paragraph offers an equally luring (and confusing) detail of stabbing or shooting or chaos. The second narrator is more methodical in her description of the violence.

The novelist, Toni Morrison, is famous for saying that she writes " the books that I wanted to read," and like her other novels, Jazz is a novel with a specific historical context, described as the depiction of "the shaping hand of slavery on Harlem's jazz generation." Almost immediately, we are told: "Armistice was seven years the winter Violet disrupted the funeral." It is 1926‹as the Armistice that ended World War I came in 1919. The feeling of the City is described as: "At last, at last, everything's ahead" and it is a time "when all the wars are over and there will never be another one." Morrison begins the novel in a brief tribute to the mythology of Harlem and the Jazz Age‹the myth of a "Mecca" for blacks Americans, of nightly jazz and world-famous cabarets like the "Savoy" and the segregated "Cotton Club."

Morrison's characters are described as city-dwellers but we learn that they are like most of Harlem's residents. Like most, they were born in the South, not in New York, individuals among thousands of southern blacks who composed the "Great Migration" from 1915 through the early 1930s. Historians describe the migration as one of both "push" and "pull" causation: the "push" of the south came in the increase in racist legal restrictions and segregation, an increase in lynching and the mechanization of cotton reaping which made manual labor obsolete. At the same time that the South was "pushing" blacks, the North "pulled" the migrants in with low unemployment rates, an emerging black community and of course, the exaggerated stories of those who had already traveled to the "Promised Land" where Jim Crow was not as pervasive. Still, Harlem life was little better than what had been left; Morrison describes unemployed veterans, and sarcastically cites racial progress when "The A&P hires a colored clerk."

As for the literary context of "Jazz," the first chapter introduces two of the definitive traits of Morrison's novels. The first characteristic is the fluidity of time. The two narrators are in disagreement over when (and what) the story is. The first goes from Joe killing Dorcas through the arrival of a second girl into the Trace home, and on a micro-level, time is fluid in the simple narration of the story: the other narrator gives us Dorcas' funeral before we know who Dorcas is, gives us Harlem before the south, and shows Violet emptying the birdcages before we meet the bird that says "I love you." Time is also made fluid because neither of the narrators are willing to dwell on any specific dates or times. Like the narrator of Morrison's first novel, "The bluest eye," these narrators focus their chronologies around the seasons, rather than the years or months, suggesting that the seasons link man to nature while wars, migrations and manmade distinctions (workdays, years) less relevant than Winter or Spring, day or night. It is in the Winter, that Violet is throwing her birds away. It is especially necessary to follow the seasons because the narrator quickly stops offering years and dates: the Spring when the Traces left the South is several years before (and not months before) the Winter when Violet stormed Dorcas' funeral and opened birdcages. Because time is fluid, the memory of the not-distant-past is as powerful and evocative as the description of the "contemporary" and in this regard, "Jazz" resembles Morrison's novel "Beloved," a narrative that shifted, like "Jazz" between actions and relationships that span decades and states.

A second defining trait of Morrison's "Jazz" is her participation in the literary tradition of "magic (or magical) realism." Magic realism is a 20th century literary tradition and William Faulkner is generally considered to be the first major writer within the tradition. twentieth century consider Faulkner as first major writer within tradition. Toni Morrison, and her fellow Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez are both famous as contemporary "magic realists." Magic realism is defined as the juxtaposition of "magical" or fantastic elements with more mundane and specific "realities." Often the artist's intention is to mythologize a familiar place, or underscore the severity or the negative aspects of "reality." In "Jazz," the streets of Harlem become sites for magical realism. The chapter's account of the reality of widespread unemployment and racial discrimination against disabled black veterans is complicated by the fantastic, almost ludicrous tangent: "A colored man floats down out of the sky blowing a saxophone." The image is provocative because the "floating" man is the only employed "colored man" on the street. The saxophone is a symbol of jazz, made magical and so unreliable as a method of survival.

Needless to say, Morrison's wry sense of humor, adds much of the personality to the narrators. Between the stories of floating men and slashed funerals, both narrators gossip in "asides," offering unsparing caricatures of Violet and other corrupted Harlemites. Even the most despondent and pathetic moments are tempered by comedy, most notably when Violet, lonely, kidnaps Philly from his buggy. As Philly's sister is scolded, no one thinks to look for child or the kidnapper and then Violet's laugh heard. Yards away, she is cradling the child in arms, standing at street corner and laughing at the scene left in her wake. At the suggestion that she is a kidnapper, Violet points to fact that she laughed and stayed at corner, visible. And she also argues that she left her bag at the stoop, but would have taken it with her if she had intended to kidnap somebody. Even though her innermost and illegal desire was revealed to the reader, victorious Violet still storms off in righteous indignation, announcing "last time I do anybody on this block a favor." This scene is matched for parody in the subtle politics of allusion in regards to the "Salem's Womens Club." There is no Salem in Harlem, and the Puritanical judgments and uncompassionate assessments of character, do well to justify the Club's metaphorical name.

One of the chapter's sharpest themes is that of aging and Violet and Dorcas make an interesting study in contrasts. Violet offers only silence, where Dorcas has intensity. Violet has tried to steal a child in the same way that youth was stolen from Dorcas. Violet is fifty years old and when she held Philly, "she imagined a brightness that could be carried in her arms. Distributed, if need be, into places dark as the bottom of a well." After being bested by her husband's younger lover, Violet becomes the mother of the ghost, in some ways and in place of the "brightness" of the would-be kidnapped child, the unsmiling photograph of Dorcas is "what seems like the only living presence in the house."

A final thematic concern of the first chapter, is the relation of music (specifically, jazz) to the urban space. The narrative is continually interrupted by lyrics and fashioned along jazz templates to produce a "jazz-prose": "Here comes the new. Look out. There goes the sad stuff. The bad stuff. The things-nobody-could-help stuff." The musicality of both narrators refers to the "Jazz" of the novel's title and expresses Morrison's desire for an "urban" feel. The novelist hinted as much in her epigram taken from The Nag Hammadi: "I am the name of the sound and the sound of the name.." The word "Sth"‹the sound of the clicking of teeth‹sets off the narrative of an impatient and familiar story-teller who has little time to stay and plenty of other obligations. The "jazz prose" of the novel is also seen in the idea of the City as a character: "A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on thins. Hep. It's the bright steel rocking above the shade below that does it." In this regard, the City is like a lover and the passage that begins the second narrative, reads as a love poem to Harlem. In the end of the chapter, Morrison exaggerates the idea of Harlem as a "jazz space" that produces love and violent love like a potion. While there will be violence, Morrison will eventually pick apart Harlem's myths of passion and stereotypes of violence.

Chapter Two:

Summary:

The second chapter begins by focusing on the domestic life of the Traces, whose life has lost much of its "ritual" as they are both working less and Violet has released the birds who were both pet and past-time for the couple. The portrait of Dorcas is in a silver frame on the mantle. While Violet perceives a "sickness in the house," emanating from the portrait, her husband, Joe Trace is only numbly aware of the "sickness." Even though he has shot Dorcas, he is a well-mannered older man who does not feel guilt for his actions. Instead, his nightly vigils are his mourning for the love affair that has ended. Violet cannot sleep and she visits the picture at night because it is quiet. In contrast, Joe Trace's visits are the pure result of his melancholic and slightly exaggerated memory of Dorcas. Trace thinks of the young girl as his "necessary thing for three months of nights," even though Dorcas was not the lover with whom he slept each night. Further, the room that he rented from Malvonne, his upstairs neighbor, was only for evening and nighttime use; we learn that Malvonne expressly refused to rent her apartment out for overnight trysts and returned home from work a little after midnight, expecting to find her apartment unoccupied. It is only now, with the portrait, that Joe can get as close to Dorcas as he wanted to while she was alive.

The narration mostly focuses on Joe Trace, in contrast to the first chapter, which focused on his wife, Violet. Both of the Traces were "field workers" in Vesper County, Virginia and soon after meeting Violet under a walnut tree (in 1906), Joe proposed marriage‹and a move to Harlem. Joe's memories of this time, roughly twenty years before the present, include his intense passion for his new wife, Violet, as well as an encounter with a mysterious woman who is half-clothed and hiding in a bush. For some reason that is not revealed to the reader, Joe Trace, having grown up an orphan, has reason to believe that this mentally-incapacitated woman may be his mother. His last memory of Vesper County is the scene of his conversation with this woman, who is hiding in a hibiscus bush. She is mostly obscured and he repeatedly asks her for some sort of gesture or "sign" to indicate that she is the mother who abandoned him. Joe thinks that the woman waved her fingers at him in response to the word "Mother," but he is unsure and realizes that even if she had, it is still an ambiguous gesture that might not be the "sign" he had asked for. Joe and Violet are two migrants in a mass exodus of blacks who are traveling to the north by train, through Virginia and across the Mason-Dixon line. The shift in politics is subtle and even after the train attendant pulls back the "green-as-poison" curtain that segregated the black passengers from the whites, most of the migrants cautiously decide against wandering the train and only a determined few venture into the newly integrated dining car. Joe remembers standing, almost dancing in the aisle with Violet, as the train approached New York City and within the collective ecstasy of the southern black travelers, he recalls the specific moment of entry into the city as a private jubilee: the sensation of Violet's hip bones dancing and rubbing against his thigh, amidst the jarring motion of the train.

Joe's thoughts briefly focus on his "silent wife" and he believes that Violet ignores him and "takes better care of her parrot" (the same parrot that she released in the middle of a blizzard). It is not until the fall of 1925, when Joe Trace meets Dorcas, that he is able to replicate the sensual experience of the train ride. It is only after this point that he feels able to celebrate Harlem with his neighbors who have already "fallen in love with the city." Dorcas lives with her aunt, Alice Manfred, and she is not even twenty years old when she meets Joe Trace, who is well more than twice her age. Joe first noticed Dorcas as a stranger walking around the neighborhood, and he made arrangements with Malvonne well before his serendipitous (if not, doom-sealing) afternoon trip to Alice Manfred's apartment to deliver a cosmetics order. It is on this afternoon that Joe formally meets Dorcas and whispers his surreptitious affection.

Joe recalls feeling a special bond with Dorcas because she is similarly motherless and Dorcas' history is not as extensive as his, though equally mysterious. The teenage girl hails from the black community of East St. Louis, Illinois and is described as an anonymous migrant among "a steady stream" who came to Harlem "after raving whites had foamed all over the lanes and yards of home." She remembers visiting a friend and being startled by screams coming from her street. Her house was deliberately set on fire and she remembers the realization that her mother and her doll collection were trapped inside and burnt alive.

Joe Trace's fascination with the city sky and massive buildings has flared and cooled and flared again in the twenty years that he has spent in Harlem and like Joe, Malvonne, his upstairs neighbor, considers herself to be an experience and weather-worn fixture of the city. Malvonne was hesitant to rent her apartment out to Joe who insisted that he would only use it on occasional evenings while she was away at work. Malvonne, lives alone, her son having left for "ChicagoŠSan DiegoŠor some other city ending with O." Soon before leaving, Malvonne's son stole a bag of mail and rifled through the letters for the money that paid for his cross-country transportation. When Malvonne discovers the twenty-pound bag of mail behind the radiator, she reads through the letters and mitigates her loneliness by meddling and intervening in the lives of the numerous senders and addressees. She finds the letters more interesting than the trash that she casually reads during her late-night job as a janitor in an upscale office building. It is suggested that Malvonne's desire to participate in her neighbor's lives was the determining factor in her decision to rent her apartment to Joe. Malvonne attributes her decision to Joe's agreement to pay a full month's rent for occasional evening use and also cites Joe's previous reputation as a well-mannered cosmetic salesman who assured her that he didn't want anything "nasty," but only wanted to "lighten [his] life a little with a good lady." The chapter concludes with a marked departure from the individual histories of the characters, returning to an abstract description of life in "the City"

Analysis:

While Chapter Two employs an "oral" and anonymous narrative voice that is similar to the narrative of the first chapter, there is one steady voice, contrasted with the disrupted "twice-told tale" of the first chapter. Additionally, there are several indicators suggesting that this narrator is either a third, new speaker or a more mature evolution of the second. In place of the first chapter's sensational and gossipy tone, the second is contemplative, offering fewer hasty judgments of character and fewer humorous tangential stories. The narrative shift reflects the novelist's intention to archive and sort-out the details of the violence that was announced at the beginning of the novel and even as this narrator replaces moral editorializing with a thorough excavation of Joe Trace's memories, the story cannot be taken as wholly reliable. The voice is still the familiar one belonging to an un-named neighbor of the Traces but some critics point to some disruption and confusion in the description of Malvonne, suggesting that Malvonne might be the narrator of the story who describes herself in third-person. Malvonne is depicted as an older, lonely woman whose "interest lay in the neighborhood people" and the revelation of her neighborly prying and frequent interventions in the lives of strangers, is very much a mirroring of the narrator's activity. In sum, the narrator continues to pry and speculate, but the tone is more reportorial than sensational, focusing on the characters' thoughts instead of their crimes.

The chapter's slower pace, de-emphasis of violence and chronological jump to the years before Dorcas' murder, are accompanied by a muted sense of irony that is composed of understatement more than humor, a substantial decrease in musical references and "jazz-prose" in preference for the rhetoric and signals of a historian, and the employment of "nature" motifs as archetypal metaphors that frequently replace the personified City of the first chapter. The muted sense of irony can be seen in the subtlety that the first narrators lacked. In the first chapter, the silence of the Trace's living space was described in extreme and stark terms: as a fishnet that Violet wanted to violently slash as she had slashed Dorcas' face. The fishnet has been re-described as a "sickness" that admits Violet's emotional vulnerability and her "Change" instead of her violent habits. Most notably, the narrator recounts the "transaction" between Joe and Malvonne and declines multiple opportunities to dwell upon the good intentions and pretenses of decency that quickly tended to violence. In this novel, violence and music are intertwined and reliant upon one another and this chapter's lack of "jazz-prose" is most evident in the fact that this narrator does not cite a single song lyric, unlike her predecessors. When Joe Trace is described "entering the lip of the City dancing all the way," his "dancing" is a mute contrast to the earlier narrative, where a musical tone was generously and indiscriminately applied to walking down the street, eating candy and kidnapping babies.

A final shift, to "nature" motifs reinforces the loss of "jazz," which is considered urban rather than rural. The narrator describes the natural scenery of Vesper County in simple terms before praising Harlem not for its "urban" skyscrapers and paved sidewalks, but for its "unbelievable" sky‹an unreliable replication of the rural sky that only occurs when the sun and stars are not "made irrelevant by the light of thrilling, wasteful street lamps." The Virginian sun "used to slide up like the yolk of a good country egg, thick and red-orange;" the hibiscus bush has an intense smell and the sky offers a more extensive palette of color to match the glitter of the city. The nature motifs allow the narrator to make a moral argument that the disrupt of migration and Harlem's relief from Southern sweltering racism, have both caused Joe and Violet to intentionally forget the beauty of the South in their efforts to forge new lives with new liberties. The hibiscus bush appeals to the sense of smell and touch, the sky appeals to the eyes and the "pebbly creeks" offer music; in sum, the "nature" motifs that constitute Joe's interior offer a wider sensory experience than the City. His fading memory is represented accordingly, as more of a loss than a relief.

The second chapter of the novel is often described as "calmer" than the first. This is mostly because the narrator's contemplative and deliberate pace enforces the stability necessary for reader to take on the "detective role" that Morrison intended for the novel's readers. While a novel's first chapter usually presents the major themes and moral questions, "Jazz" begins with disorientation. In the second chapter, Morrison establishes Joe Trace as a character whose history is a mere "trace," like the "traces of ash" of Dorcas' burned home. The major theme of the novel is the maintenance of memory when it is only a fragmented history. The spaces and "traces" of Joe, Violet and Dorcas' separate histories unite them as representatives of a migrant generation. The City, as much as it is a "mecca" for southern Blacks, emerges as a force of frustration whose glitter and jazz offer a temporary alleviation from the primary moral concern: the preservation of family and cultural memory as a source of self-definition.

In this sense, "Jazz" continues the thematic journey that Morrison began in "Beloved," where ex-slaves struggled to preserve the memories that defined them without becoming obsessed with and consumed by their previous suffering. Like "Beloved," "Jazz" reinforces the loss of memory with the loss of family and loss of fertility. Violet's distant and fading memory of her childhood is reflected by her own barren-ness, her frustrated attempt to kidnap a child and her violence against Dorcas. Her orphan status is manifest in her inability to be a mother. Similarly, Joe Trace's mother is unknown is not a madwoman in a bush and his self-naming as "Trace" reveals his awareness of his lack of origin and his subsequent efforts to birth himself. Violet and most other migrants are "orphans" in the sense that the black South is a home that they have departed, but Joe Trace and Dorcas are "double-orphans" who do not have a family or a home.

Chapter Three:

Summary:

Chapter Three continues with the history of Dorcas' aunt, Alice Manfred. Alice Manfred lived in Harlem for several years before she called for her niece, Dorcas, to live with her. One of earliest memories of Dorcas is a Fifth Avenue parade in July, 1917, where silent men and women marched to condemn the lynch riots that had just occurred in East St. Louis, Illinois. Alice's reason for continuing in Harlem, despite her overwhelming fear of the music and fast pace of the city, is never revealed, but Dorcas' arrival does allow Alice to make her fears and concerns vicarious. Dorcas lives in an apartment of oppression‹her clothes are unflattering; Alice instructs her niece to be "deaf and blind;" she teaches her how to avoid anything that is living and unknown. Her "elaborate specifications" are a well-intentioned effort to protect Dorcas from the "Day of Judgment," "The Beast" and "Imminent Demise." Both the aunt and the niece, privately admire the songs and dances of the street, and Dorcas eventually acts upon her desires.

After hinting at Dorcas' "Imminent Demise" at the hands of Joe Trace, the chapter offers more details of Dorcas' history. The East St. Louis riot that the Fifth Avenue march protested is the same riot that orphaned Dorcas. Her mother (Alice Manfred's sister) was "burned crispy" in her home and her father "was pulled off a streetcar and stomped to death." While the music of Harlem's streets makes Alice think of the horror and "disorder" of East St. Louis, Dorcas is able to remember little of her old home. She remembers her dolls making the sound "Sst, like a match" and she remembers the wood chips falling from the porch of her burning house. The fiery sight struck her mute for five days, and she remembers thinking that the burning wood chip had entered her mouth and "traveled down her throat" before it "lodged comfortably somewhere below her navel." The narrative continues the discussion of fire and passion, recounting the remainder of Dorcas' childhood in New York. While Alice Manfred worked, the Miller sisters babysat Dorcas and a few other children. Dorcas was fascinated by the "one-armed" sister, Neola, who smoked cigarettes and read Psalms to the children. Neola's told stories of "the flesh" that would never see "Paradise;" like Alice Manfred's warnings of "The Beast," the warning is interpreted by Dorcas as an enticing story, rather than a cautionary tale.

After constructing Dorcas' childhood, the chapter's middle passage offers a few specific details regarding Dorcas' escapades. Her steady movement towards "Imminent Demise" begin on "a night in her sixteenth year." Alice Manfred had "overnight business in Springfield" and Dorcas seized the opportunity to accompany her friend, Felice, to a dance party, where she (Dorcas) is awkward though enthralled and ultimately rejected. Having "tasted" the music, Dorcas finds her life "unbearable" until Joe Trace enters the scene. Joe has interrupted a lunch meeting of the Civic Daughters, held in Alice Manfred's apartment. The women are older and gregarious and invite him to stay, wholly unaware of what would result from his visit. The third, final section of the chapter offers Alice's thoughts of Joe Trace and his "impunity" for killing her niece and shattering her delusion of safety. As Violet Trace continues to visit Alice in her efforts to educate herself about Dorcas' life, Alice is initially exasperated and gives Dorcas' photograph to Violet in order to get her to leave. Violet's visits remind Alice of her own husband, Louis Manfred, who left her and forced her to admit to her own inability to comprehend the cruelty, violence and bloodshed of the surrounding world. She must also confront the fact that she shares Dorcas' desire for passion and Violet's desire for vengeance, despite her efforts to eradicate them.

Analysis

Much of the structure of this chapter reflects the novelist's efforts to maintain symmetry and balance between the characters. The reflection on Louis Manfred's dead body, as well as his funeral, serves as a parallel to Dorcas' corpse which was dishonored at her funeral. The strongest sense of symmetry comes in the budding relationship between Violet and Alice, summed up in the phrase: "The woman who avoided the streets let into her living room the woman who sat down in the middle of one." If Violet is a woman who will sit down in a street, Alice is a woman who prefers to sit down in a house. Unsurprisingly, there are several images that serve as parallel symbols to contrast the two women.

For Alice, the primary image is the iron, which she admires for its "heated control." Alice remains behind the "ironing board" in her conversations with Violet, and she relies upon this mainstay of domesticity when she fears that her emotions may overwhelm her. Just as she imprisons Dorcas in a "cast iron skirt," she remembers that "years ago she had guided the tip of the iron into the seams of a man's white shirt," in an effort to the displace the violence that she wants to render to her philandering (and dead) husband. Early on in their relationship, Alice remarks to Violet: "I don't understand women like you. Women with knives." Similarly fashioned of metal, Violet's knife is a domestic utensil relied upon with a more formidable purpose. Alice maligns Violet as "a brutal woman black as soot known to carry a knifeŠthe star of her niece's funeralŠ" "Women with knives" becomes a species of woman in which Alice includes anonymous, historic women who attacked men and "left the razor where it lodged," and other times left men to find themselves the victims of "four evenly spaced jabs by something thin, round and sharp."

Another parallel can be seen in the two main Biblical allusions that occur in the third chapter. The first allusion is to the Garden of Eden as Alice Manfred depicts the scenes of sin where Joe Trace brought about the "snake-in-the-grass stealing of the girl in her charge." She later apostrophizes Dorcas, speaking to her of the places known for "offeringŠmelons and green apples." Contrasting the Eden of Genesis, is the apocalypse of Revelations. Alice Manfred and the Miller sisters enjoy the "sweet relief" of the "Day of Judgment" when they believe that the world will come to a fiery end on account of its sins. The images of "The Beast" and the "Whore of Babylon" described with "lips rouge red as hellfireŠfingernails tipped with blood" are all direct Biblical references. Alice, often times, wishes that she could bring about judgment herself and "snatch the world in her fist and squeeze the life out of it for doing what it did."

One of the chapter's two central themes is the idea of youth, depicted in the contrast between Dorcas and her aunt, Alice. Alice reflects on her own childhood when she found her parents "resenting the tips showing and growing under the chemisesŠ resenting the blood spots, the new hips, the hair." Somewhat to her chagrin, she finds that she stymied Dorcas' youth in the same ways that made her bitter. She realizes that Dorcas has "decayed on the vine at budding time," in part because she made her restrictions unpalatable. The second theme is the idea of memory. The central memory of the chapter is Dorcas' distant memory of the riot in which her parents were savagely killed. Even within the details of the historic act, the theme of memory is present. After seeing her trampled husband, Dorcas' mother "had gone back home to try and forget the color of his entrails." Dorcas' memory is symbolized by the fire that burned down her house. She decided to "eat" the fire and hold it in her stomach and "it smoked and glowed there still. Dorcas never let it out and never put it out." Her personal memory of her parents' death becomes part of a larger memory as Alice Manfred, Violet and Joe Trace remember the memorial parades held in Harlem as a tribute to those who died in East St. Louis.

Chapter Four:

Summary:

After a conversation with Alice Manfred, Violet Trace goes to Duggie's drugstore to drink a malt shake‹an effort to regain the weight she has lost in the last few months. Considering the changes occurring within her body, Violet contemplates " that other Violet." We learn that the "other" Violet knows things that Violet does not know and often acts without Violet's permission. The other Violet has cut Dorcas' face with a knife, released the birds from their cage and is proud of what she has done. Violet is embarrassed as she remembers the funeral scene when her knife "bounced off" of Dorcas' face and only made "a little dent." She notes that the other Violet is as strong as she was back in Virginia, and she is able to wrestle with the young men who are part of Dorcas' funeral service. In contrast to "that kicking, growling Violet," Violet notes that her arms have been softened from doing hair for twenty years. After thinking about her performance at Dorcas' funeral, Violet looks around Duggie's drugstore (which the law would overtax, define as a restaurant) and when she sees a young girl at the magazine rack, she wonders what her husband Joe, was looking for in Dorcas. Violet tortures herself with a litany of unanswerable questions, contrasting her silent loneliness with the music and dancing that Joe was sharing with his new, adolescent lover. Violet's anger peaks as the narrative shifts to a first-person speaker. Violet calls Dorcas a heifer and assigns her the blame for Joe's infidelity. Her anger is larger than Dorcas though, and Violet ends the first section of the chapter with two self-realizations.

Her first self-realization comes in her unspoken declaration: "that Violet is me!" Violet launches into twenty year old memories of Virginia: days spent hauling hay and nights suffering the canebrush snakes, as she waited to meet her lover, "my Joe Trace, my Virginia Joe Trace." These memories, Violet argues, are a repository that is separate from and more sacred than what Dorcas can offer. Violet's self-affirming thoughts are brief and she returns to the doldrums, beguiled by insecurities concerning her (lack of) beauty. After Violet recollects that Dorcas had "high-yellow skin," held in higher regard than her own darker complexion, she believes that Joe only loved in Virginia because "that girl Dorcas wasn't around there anywhere." Violet Trace's fleeting thoughts of "Golden Gray," the beloved blonde prince of her grandmother's mythology, only worsen "the business going on inside [her]." Her resolute decision to stop thinking about Joe's infidelity comes with a second self-realization, concerning her marriage: "from the very beginning I was a substitute [for Dorcas] and so was he [for Golden Gray]."

To give the details of Violet's family history, the chapter shifts to the original third-person narrator. One morning back in Violet's childhood, some time after her father had deserted the family, debt collectors repossessed their house and belongings. Violet's mother, Rose Dear, was presented with a "piece of paper" (presumably, an IOU) that her debtor husband had signed, authorizing the repossession. Stupefied, Rose Dear sat the dining table, sipping from an empty cup as the debt collectors emptied the house, took the dining table and slid Rose Dear out of her chair. Rose Dear's mother, True Belle, left her job in Baltimore and arrived to "take charge and over." Four years later, presuming that her children were in good hands, Rose Dear killed herself by jumping into a well. Two weeks after her burial, her husband arrived on the scene with "[chocolate] ingots of goldŠtwo-dollar piecesŠand snake oil."

True Belle sends her granddaughters to Palestine, Virginia where an exceptionally large cotton harvest has sparked a labor migration. One night, Violet is sleeping under a tree and she startled by a man who has fallen out of the tree under which she had been sleeping. This is Joe Trace, and his hammock has broken. After the cotton work is over, Violet sends her money home with her sisters and she finds other work in the area, so that she can stay close to Joe. After marrying Joe, Violet had plans to go to Baltimore, having heard years of her grandmother's Baltimore stories. In the end, of course, Joe and Violet decide to take the train to New York, joining a steady migration of black Southerners. Excited though challenged by the rigors of "citylife," the couple decided that they did not want children and Violet's three miscarriages "were more inconvenience than loss." By the time she was forty, however, Violet's "mother-hunger" had become "a panting, unmanageable craving," and her "citylife" began to unravel in chaos. The chapter ends with the conversation that Violet has with Alice Manfred before leaving for the drugstore. Violet asks Alice what Joe might have seen in her niece and Miss Manfred is soon exasperated with Violet's conversation, accidentally burning a hole in the shirt that she was ironing. The scene ends as the two women laugh at (and through) their frustration.

Analysis:

In this chapter, the story-telling narrator has gelled into one distinct voice; this marks an evolution from the chorus of three voices that began the novel. The most obvious development is that Violet, one of the characters, narrates a portion of the chapter in her own voice‹this continues with different characters for the rest of the novel. The combination of the strictly narrative and deeply personal voices of the two speakers allows the novelist to employ different techniques to make her arguments. Unlike Violet, the third-person narrator freely uses irony and understatement throughout the chapter. It is this narrator who describes "that other Violet, " suggests that when Rose Dear jumped into a well she "missed all the fun," and depicts Violet's father "loaded with ingots of gold" only to reveal, several sentences later, that the "ingots" are merely chocolates in a wealthy wrapping paper. Violet's narrative voice relies mostly upon comparisons and contrasts, drawing up litanies of points where she differs from the younger, "high-yellow skinned" Dorcas.

The image of Violet's parrot is one of several images that recurs throughout the chapter. Ironically, after Violet has released the "green and blond" parrot from his cage and left him to freeze outside, she "paced the rooms" as if she was locked in a cage. Meanwhile, the parrot stares at her through the window, as if he a human staring at a bird pacing in its cage. The commentary on the parrot, with "wings grown stiff from disuse," establishes the bird as a metaphor for Violet's inability to regain her lost muscles and free herself from the negative aspects of "citylife." The Eden motif also garners further development in this chapter as Violet recounts her story of the gardens of Virginia, where she suffered the bites and "welts" of snakes in her pursuit of the man who fell "like fruit" from a tree. Despite the sweltering racism and difficult labor that Violet suffered in Virginia, her home state functions as a pastoral ideal that is to be contrasted with "citylife." The images of Virginia are of harvests, ripening fruit and fruitful sexual unions. In contrast, "citylife" dismisses Violet's three miscarriages as "inconveniences."

A final motif that emerges in the chapter, is the teacup. While the iron and ironing board are Alice Manfred's mainstays of domesticity, in both the third and fourth chapters, we find that she considers the "calming effects" of tea to be beneficial in her efforts to reform Violet. The fourth chapter begins with a drugstore scene that occurs after Violet has had tea in Alice Manfred's apartment, but the tea drinking scene is not depicted until the end of the chapter. When Violet remembers her mother's teacup, wrested away by the debt collectors, it is the chronological consequence of her tea at Alice's. Nonetheless, Rose Dear's tea-cup misadventure serves as an impediment to Alice Manfred's social mission, in part, because we read Rose Dear's situation before the narrator gets to Alice Manfred's tea.

One of the two major themes of the chapter, hearkens back to the third chapter's Miller sisters. This chapter more fully explores the idea of the physical body's manifestation of internal and spiritual suffering. This idea is dramatically presented in the dissection of Violet Trace into Violet and "that other Violet." The consequence of her dissection is made literal in her weight loss. The theme of the memory is woven in with the images of the body, when Violet recalls the days when she was emotionally complete by remembering the times when she was able to haul hay and work for long stretches of hours. Even as her memory focuses on the days when her physical body was whole, her memory is as debilitated as her present physical state. Violet's emotional distress is emphasized in images that distort her body into something incomplete or bestial. She is likened both to her parrot and to "something wearing a pelt." Her memory of "claiming" Joe Trace, is contingent upon her memory of the welts and scars that she suffered from the snakes.

The final connections between the themes of the body and memory are developed in Violet's parents. Her father is an absent body, only occasionally present. The narrator remarks that whenever he did come to town, "forgetfulness fell like pollen." His physical absence as a "resurrected" "phantom father," justifies and sustains his ability to effect forgetfulness. Commenting on Violet's efforts to remember her mother, the narrator reveals that "the well sucked her sleep." Violet is unable to conjure a complete memory of her mother because of the empty void of the well. It is only when Violet focuses on the image of the empty well long enough to see her mother's diminished and twisted body at the bottom, that her memory is restored.

Chapter Five:

Summary:

This comparatively short chapter opens with a vivid description of springtime in New York City, as the natural landscape seeks to show the humans "the range of what an artful City can do." It is a rainy afternoon, in the Spring of 1926, and Joe Trace is crying to himself as he looks outside of his window. Meanwhile, citylife continues its brisk pace in the streets. Blind men and beggars are singing on the street corners. Evaluating the scene as a whole, the narrator says that she was never deceived by Joe Trace's seemingly quiet and considerate demeanor. After being faithful to his wife for over twenty years, he is feeling sorry for himself because his one stray act has resulted in helpless calamity. After the storyteller's final commentary, that Joe sought Dorcas because he is only sixteen years on the inside, the narrative responsibilities shift to Joe.

Joe immediately distinguishes himself from other people who "put all their business in the street." In contrast, he says, he kept his relationship with Dorcas as a secret. He thought to tell his friends Stuck and Gistan, but they would have offered little assistance and anyway, they would not have wanted the burden of knowing. Joe remembers his childhood friend, Victory Williams, the only person who merits this level of trust. Joe recounts the simple beginnings of his affair with Dorcas; he had noticed her on the street, well before he met her in the doorway of Alice Manfred's apartment. Joe admits that his desire to start a "new" relationship was fueled by the fact that he "never got close to anybody" in Harlem. Dorcas became Joe's confidante, even as he was troubled that a significant and increasing portion of his life was being lived in secret.

Joe Trace dates his birth in 1873, and he gives an extensive description of his childhood in Vienna, Virginia, beginning with his life in the home of Rhoda and Frank Williams. The Williams' raised Joe along with six of their own children. While the Williams couple cares for Joe as well as they care for their natural children, they are honest with Joe, informing him that he is not their natural child. When a younger Joe asks Rhoda about his parents she replies, "O honey, they disappeared without a trace." Joe misinterprets the comment and changes his last name after he identifies himself as "the Œtrace'" without which his parents disappeared. Joe identifies "the best man in Vesper County," a man he calls "hunters hunter" as another parental figure in his life as a young orphan.

Joe Trace's narrative segue from his life in Virginia to his life in New York, is carried about in the seven "changes" that he says he has experienced. During the period of his seven changes, the small black community of Vienna, Virginia is attacked by "red fire" and "white sheets." Years later, during the summer of 1917, Joe recounts the frenzy of the Harlem riots. Joe awoke to find a white man removing his compatriot's metal pipe from around Joe's head, a sympathetic act that rescued Trace from certain death in the streets. He remembers struggling with Violet in their early years in Harlem, marching in the Armistice parade for the colored regiments, and overcoming the "lighter-skinned renters" who sought to keep him out of Lenox Avenue's nicer apartments. Having traced his journey from Virginia to New York, Joe focuses on his relationship with Dorcas. Joe was and remains in love with Dorcas and he regrets shooting her. After she ended the relationship, a disconsolate Trace spent five days "rambling" through the streets, before he found her. Despite his regrets, Joe remains fixed in two beliefs: that Dorcas did not mean the harsh words that she said, and that the brief "taste" of happiness is well worth the consequential sadness.

Analysis

This chapter's primary effort is the presentation of Joe Trace and the opening narrator announces that she "was never deceived" as she sought to resolve Joe's placid exterior with his recent criminal act. Indeed, just as the chapter's opening argues that "the City urges contradiction," the composite of Joe Trace's character is simply a compilation of juxtapositions. The narrator notes that the stream of Joe Trace's tears parallels the rain, but this contrasted with the "streetlife" of "roosters" (young men) in competition and "old uncles," who are playing the "six-string guitar." The narrator presents Trace as a "faithful man" who removes trash and manure from the front of the building‹right before "sauntering off to his swank hotel." The narrator continues: "the sweater would be buttoned all the way up, but I know his thoughts are not‹they are loose." Joe Trace appears to be "a faithful man near fifty," but inside, he has "[stopped] somewhere around sixteen." Toni Morrison depicts Joe Trace's sixteen-year-old inside, when she uses his voice to continue the chapter's narration. The structure of Joe's account is presented in the literary tradition of the "bildungsroman," (a German word, defined as a coming-of-age story) even as Joe's changes start rather late in his childhood and never culminate in emotional maturity. Joe's fifty-year old youth sustains several of the motifs of the previous chapters and adds to Morrison thematic commentary on "Memory."

The Eden motif, is made explicit when Joe apostrophizes his dead lover: "you were the reason Adam ate the apple and its core." Joe positions himself as the most recent Adam as he "let the red peeling [of the apple] break his heart." While Joe distinguishes himself from the "roosters," the Eden motif affirms his youth and the original narrator's confirmation ("he's a kid, a strapling") is a revealing pun. A stripling is a "kid," a young man; a strapling, is a young tree. As he admits, "I thought it was really Eden," Joe plays the roles of Adam and the tree, before returning to his originally cast role as the serpent. Reminiscing on his final "taste" of youth, Joe remarks "They say snakes go blind for a while before they shed skin for the last time." The return of the snake imagery, deflates Joe's youth and the "shed skin" parallels the "red peeling" of his broken heart.

Much of Joe Trace's history is a "trace" and the word "trace" has several significant connotations in the chapter. Joe's efforts to track down Dorcas, as he traces and rambles through the City, recall his experiences with Hunters Hunter. More significant than this, Joe's memory is only a trace. His commentary is among the novel's shortest and most of the details of his life are only foreshadowed here‹they are revealed in subsequent chapters. The theme of memory is collectivized in this chapter and this is in part, because Joe does not have an extensive personal history to rely upon. The riots, evictions by fire, Jim Crow laws and victory parades that he discusses are all independently significant events of African-American history, even if he did suffer personal consequences. Unsurprisingly, Joe Trace's commentary focuses more on historical events and socio-economic realities than on the non-entities of his parents.

Chapter Six:

Summary:

The narrator begins the chapter intending to understand True Belle's "state of mind when she moved from Baltimore back to Vesper County," to take care of her evicted daughter, Rose Dear, who was purportedly living in an abandoned shack. True Belle was a slave when she left Vesper County for Baltimore, but she was a free woman when she returned in 1888. True Belle convinced her employer (and former master), Vera Louise Gray, that she was dying and wanted to return to Vesper County to live her final days with her family. True Belle lived with Vera Louise Gray in a large house in a sophisticated Baltimore neighborhood. The third occupant, Golden Gray, was Vera's son, named at birth for his radiant golden color. Vera had lived in Vesper County, on the plantation owned by her father, Colonel Wordsworth Gray. In a small community where "nobody could hide much," Vera Louise enjoyed a romantic affair with one of her slaves and after she revealed herself to be pregnant, her parents disowned her. Offering her a "lingerie case full of money" and the slave of her choice (True Belle). In her years of service to Vera Louise, True Belle considers the child, Golden Gray, to be the "light of her life" and she returns to Virginia with two decades of wages ("ten eagle dollars") and eighteen years of Golden Gray stories. His pampered, princely life of "embroidered underwear" and "honeysuckle" baths, ends when his mother finally admits that his father was a black slave. It is True Belle, however, who offers Golden Gray the needed information of his father's whereabouts.

The narrative continues with Golden Gray's journey to Vienna, Virginia to find his father, Henry LesTroy(or Lestory). Towards the end of his journey by horse and carriage, Golden Gray's concerns that he has lost his way are interrupted by a rustling in the bushes and the startling sight of "a naked berry-black woman." Startled by the presence of Golden Gray's carriage, the woman turns to run away but moves too quickly and without rhythm, banging her head against a tree trunk and falling into unconsciousness. The young man tries to convince himself that the woman was "a vision," but he overcomes his feelings of nausea and approaches the side of the road. The woman is naked, bloody and dirty; she is also extremely pregnant. Wrestling with himself, Golden Gray eventually decides to bring the woman along with him, because the heroic act will be an anecdote.

After his sixth hour of travel, Golden Gray arrives at an empty cabin where he decides to rest, suspecting that this is the cabin where his father lives. He sets his trunk on the dirt floor, finds water for his horse and then tends to the woman in carriage, setting her on the bed in the cabin's second bedroom. After surveying the cabin, Golden Gray struggles to set a fire and later gets drunk from the contents of a jug of liquor. A young black boy arrives at the cabin and indicates that Mr. Henry has asked him to tend the animals while he was away. After Golden Gray asks, the boy explains that Henry has been away for several days though he will be returning in the near future. Golden Gray searches his trunk for his finest clothes and feels suddenly overwhelmed by the proximity of his father, a man whom he has never known. As Golden Gray considers his pain, the narrator expresses her desire to bestow "some brief benevolent love" that might temper the young man's suffering and enable him to complete his mission.

Analysis:

The story of Golden Gray supplies the central motifs of the chapter. Certainly, Golden Gray is only the newest addition to a sizeable collection of orphans in the novel. Still, the phrase "adoration of the orphan" suggests that Golden is set aside. Indeed, the young man's name as well as the reference to "the Prince of Wales" raise suspicions regarding Golden's auspicious birth, namely, that the words "Prince" and "adoration" suggest that Golden Gray is divine offspring. These suspicions are confirmed when Morrison makes her intentions more explicit. After we see Golden Gray seated "in a two-seat phaeton," his story increasingly bears an allusion to the Greek mythological story of Phaeton, the "orphaned" son of the sun god, Apollo. Ironically, Golden Gray's mysterious father is an unimpressive ex-slave‹"a man of no consequence"‹but this does not deflate the intense "Phaeton" imagery that surrounds the character. If his "golden" and "radiant" do not hint at the allusion, the phrase "sunlight color" and the metaphors of Golden Gray as a "light" and a "lamp" are far more explicit.

Like Phaeton, the son of Apollo, Golden Gray embarks upon a journey to find his father. The "hubris" (Greek word for excessive, often youthful pride) of Phaeton, a son of a god, makes Golden Gray all the more tragic; his father is less impressive than most. The "phaeton" images are strongest during Golden Gray's journey to his father's house. The "two-seat phaeton" and horse bear references to Apollo's role as a charioteer, and after Golden Gray finds his father's house, he immediately goes to the stable and tends to his horse. He is initially struck by the "golden" color of the August sky and when he arrives at the cabin, later in the evening, he sets a fire in a fireplace which is "the grandest thing in the room."

Even as Golden Gray seeks to juxtapose his princely manners with the visceral horror of the "wild woman" he has found, he is not immune to the pained memories that stalk the novel's other characters. For all of the images of the wild woman's matted blood and distended skin, the most severe images regard Golden Gray, again fusing the themes of memory and the physical body. When Golden realizes that the meeting with his father is imminent, he finds himself crying, admitting: "now that I know I have a father, do I feel his absence." The meeting with his father, will erase Golden Gray's memory of the father's absence, replacing it with something physical and tangible. This is dramatically presented in his thoughts of a "surgery," as a metaphor for his soon to be erased orphanhood. "I thought everybody was one-armed, like me," begins, but the surgery is not a surgery of re-attachment but the "sundering" of when the father was taken. Before he can erase his memory of absence, he has to realize that there was an absence. Hence, the "one-armed" orphan feels the arm/father being taken away, and is to absorbed in that pain to make the most of the presentation of the arm/father: "I feel the surgeryŠthe crunch of boneŠsliced flesh and the tubes of blood cut throughŠsinging pain." In meeting his father, Golden Gray realizes that he never had one.

When Golden Gray considers his memory, "this part of me that does not know me," he suffers the concomitant stresses of reconciling new revelations with old memories, while still retaining the old, false memories that define him. The narrator takes a more personal role in the story, looking for an emollient that might both "diminish" the young man's "singing pain" and provide it with "language that wishes him well." To do this, a flashback is employed, and the image of the well is resurrected from the scenes of Rose Dear's death, linking Golden Gray to Violet Trace. Additionally, the subtleties of Vesper County, the description of the hunter's cabin and the appearance of a "wild woman" foreshadows the revealing portions of the next chapter. Joe Trace will reconstitute the painful memories that he buried behind his evasive comments in the last chapter: "I tracked my mother in Virginia and it led me right to herŠI wasn't looking for the trail. It was looking for meŠ" The seventh chapter reveals much about the Traces' separate histories, utilizing Golden Gray's "Phaeton" escapade as a seemingly unlikely connection between the two. In the convolutions of the next chapter, the "phantom" of the "wild woman" will emerge as "more than likely to be" Joe Trace's mother and the cabin's owner will emerge as "more than likely to be" Golden Gray's father. The thematic relationship between the body and memory is built upon the juxtapositions of this chapter and in some ways, the common phrase "no pain, no gain" resembles the novel's central thesis. Certainly, Morrison doesn't suggest that one self-inflict "pain" for "gain;" rather, the question is: once the pain is there, how can it be transformed into something "singing," into an "enabling, serene power" or a "brief benevolent love."

In the mechanics of Morrison's narrative "benevolence" and "singing pain," it is well worth noting that none of the orphans have the whole story. Joe Trace is unaware of the suffering orphan, Golden Gray, who saves his wild, pregnant mother. Golden Gray is unaware of the suicidal maid, Rose Dear, whose "leftover smiles" pay the pain for his "brief, benevolent love." Morrison's decision to transport the "well" as a metaphor to benefit Golden Gray could be interpreted as deus ex machina (translates to, "God is in the machine). When classical Greek dramas became convoluted, only a divine presence could restore the necessary balance of justice, and the restoration was automatic. Morrison does thematically establish memory as a potential force of restoration, but for all the story's convolutions, restoration is never guaranteed and restoration itself is painful‹both for the restored and the restorers. After Golden Gray's "surgery," the "benevolent love" vaporizes into "nothing" and Golden Gray can only carry its "memory." The presence of the well becomes suicidal for a second time, when "love" restores at its own expense, extinguished by its own "enabling, serene power that flicks like a razor and then hides."

Chapter Seven:

Summary:

Chapter Seven continues along the narrative thread begun in the previous chapter. In his conversation with a boy named Honor, Golden Gray learns that his presumed father, Mr. Henry, will soon return to the cabin, having been gone for several days. Waiting to meet his father, Golden Gray considers the naked, pregnant woman who is semi-conscious in one of the bedrooms, her body covered by a green dress. After this brief recapitulation, the narrator moves to a description of the wild woman and her environs, thirteen years after Golden Gray's journey. The woman is a harmless terror for the town, spending most of her time in a nearby cane filed though her intermittent brushes with village civilization transform her into a phantom. She becomes a spirit of distraction and chaos: "harming" babies, confounding old men and frustrating field workers whenever they sense her presence. A man called Hunters Hunter is the one who first cared for her when she was pregnant. (The name "Hunters Hunter" should reveal that he is the man that Joe Trace referred to in Chapter Five; if he cared for the woman then we know that she survives and that he is also Mr. Henry). Thirteen years later, Hunters Hunter, is moving through a field and he feels a tap on his shoulder, immediately knowing that it is the phantom woman. Even as her presence sparks the usual, mild controversy, Hunters Hunter becomes nostalgic. He remembers tending for her and naming her Wild after she bit him. Despite her capacity for rehabilitation, Hunters Hunter cared for her and he also remembers her "babygirl laugh." He remembers her as the source of "the chief unmothering" and he becomes extremely sad when he considers the brush on his shoulder, concluding that "instead of resting she was hungry still."

The chapter's second section returns to the scene, thirteen years before, when Henry Lestory (Hunters Hunter, Mr. Henry) is "instantly alarmed" by the presence of Golden Gray and his carriage. Henry views Golden Gray as "a whiteman" and equates his presence with trouble. The father and son do not immediately speak to one another as Henry interrogates the boy, Honor, who explains that the white man has brought the bleeding and pregnant black woman into the cabin. Henry leaves the room and after surveying the cabin and discovering the empty jug of consumed liquor, he curtly asks Golden Gray "Do we know one another?" The impact of the young man's reply, "No. Daddy. We don't." is mitigated by Wild's screams. Honor and Henry assist in the delivery of the child and Honor is sent to inform his mother and the other women of the village, as it is clear that Wild has no intention of nursing her child. The conversation between the father and son is tense and emotionally unrewarding. Henry explains that Vera Louise never informed him of the pregnancy and that "A son ain't what a woman say. A son is what a man do." Essentially, Henry's ultimatum is that Golden Gray intends to live as his son, the young man will have to become less of a prince, accept the physical rigors of rural life and self-identify as a black person. Golden Gray's sober thoughts are mostly of anger and he considers shooting Henry. Of course, he neither vocalizes nor acts upon the idea.

Joe Trace is the subject of the chapter's final sections. The narrator confirms Joe's relationship with Victory and the exodus out of Vienna, after racist's burned the town down. Soon after the fires' onset (they burned for months), Joe returned to the cane field to search for Wild, hoping to communicate with her and confirm that she is his mother. Additionally, Joe is worried that fires may have confused Wild and she could have easily wandered herself into a doomed situation. During one of the childhood trips with Hunters Hunter, Joe and Victory joked about hunting the wild woman. Joe legitimately interprets Hunter's stoic response: "Šthat woman is somebody's mother and somebody ought to take care," as an intimation that Wild was his mother. Joe takes three journeys to find his mother, traveling into her favorite cane fields and much of the nearby forest. One of Joe's most visceral memories is when he pursued the singing voice coming out of a hibiscus bush. By the time he reaches the bush, the woman has only left her tracks as confirmation of her presence. Joe is never able to confirm that the woman is his mother and after a final, frustrated attempt to track Wild down, he finds an eager willingness to leave Virginia, moving to Harlem with his wife. The chapter ends with two final images. The first is an image of Joe Trace as he is tracking through the streets in search of Dorcas, riding a train and searching for the couple's favorite tree, hours before he shoots the teen. The final image blurs Joe's self-consoling search for Dorcas with an inventory-like description of the hunter's cabin where Golden Gray sought his father.

Analysis

Relying upon several flashbacks, this chapter fills in almost all of the novel's narrative spaces. One interesting consequence is that several of the character's names become ironic. Golden Gray's name was an identifier of his auspicious beginnings and mythological radiance. In the course of the seventh chapter, his hopes are dashed and he is a dimmed and dull gray: the gray of indecision, of gloom and of course, the irresolute gray produced when black and white combine. While Golden Gray was named for his personal characteristics, the slaves have random names. True Belle has little significance in True Belle's life, Henry is a ubiquitous name and Rose Dear sounds more like "Rose, Dear" a patronizing name for a servant. Henry gives himself a last name after slavery, but this too is mangled as LesTory and Lestroy and the memory of others dictates that Henry will be largely remembered as "Hunters Hunter." The name is as familiar as it is inadequate, considering that all of Henry are paternal and harmless. When he instructs Joe, he warns him not to hunt "nothing tender and nothing female." Ironically, he only becomes a Hunter's Hunter when Joe remembers him during his own hunts, first, when he is hunting for his mother and again, when hunting for Dorcas.

Joe Trace intended "trace" as a reference to his parents immediate departure after his birth, but his mother's name, "Wild," serves as a stumbling block. He can only gather traces of his mother's identity because he thinks that he must hunt her like a wild animal. He is unable to relate with the mother called Wild and his own name becomes poignant when his mother becomes a literal "trace" of music and smoke. Joe says that he traces this trace in Dorcas' path, stalking her for five days in the same manner in which he hunted for his mother. The connection between the hunt for the mother and the young lover transforms the Eden imagery of the covert couple, recasting Joe as a forest hunter in the streets of Manhattan, looking for "trees" and "prey."

Virginia's imagery as an idyllic past is called into question by a more revealing account of the racist attack on Vienna. In contrast to Joe's fleeting mention of "red fires" and "white sheets," this scene is expanded into an allusion to the Biblical exodus of the "Chosen People" out of Egypt. The euphemistic tendency ("red fires" and "white sheets") is continued in the ironic phrase: "nine hundred Negroes, encouraged by guns and hemp, left Vienna," but the shootings and lynching (ropes are made out of hemp) are evaded by a migration through towns called "Bear," "Crossland," "Goshen" and "Palestine." The smoke and fire of the blighted town become the pillars of smoke and fire that guided the freed slaves out of Egypt and the despondent congregation seeks consolation in Divine vengeance, "reminding others about the wages sin paid out to its laborers." (A well-known Bible verse begins "the wages of sin is death.")

Most important, Virginia not only links Joe to Dorcas through the hunt, but through the image of fire. Dorcas swallows the embers of her burning house, to lodge the memory of her burnt mother in her gut. The description of Joe's encounters comes much later and we find Joe worried that his mother might have burned in the fire she pursued, not understanding that "it would swallow your breath away." The idea of fire as a symbol for memory is subverted again, when Joe erases Dorcas in a gust of smoke and when he reflects that Vienna's "little graveyardsŠpleading for remembrance in careful block letters, never stood a chance." That Joe shot Dorcas is especially significant because it continues the fire imagery and corresponds with his final image of his mother: "oil, ashes." The sites of memory are, alternately, empty wells, one-armed bodies and wraiths of smoke. After a litany of solitary and doomed journeys, Morrison establishes the idea that her characters will not overcome memory's foreboding pain if they journey independently, alone.

Chapter Eight:

Summary:

This is the shortest chapter in the novel, describing the party where Dorcas is shot and killed by her lover, Joe Trace. It is an "adult party" with illegal liquor and entrance fees. The party is being held in an apartment building and the loudest sounds are the sounds of laughing and music. The partygoers sense that their instincts are inflamed; they are co-conspirators who nod and smile when they notice disappearances into closed rooms. Dorcas is dancing with her new boyfriend, a young man named Acton. She crosses her arms behind his neck while they dance and she notices that her younger boyfriend does not have white strands in his mustache. He has never given her a present but Dorcas prefers the company of youth to "a pair of silk stockings," or any other gift that Joe Trace would have given her.

The last part of the chapter is narrated in Dorcas' voice. She know that Joe is stalking her and she remembers the temper of his eyes after she told him not to follow her or visit her again. She had practiced in front of a mirror, rehearsed the lines that she was going to use, but Joe argued with her and Dorcas became exasperated. After telling Joe that he "made her sick," Dorcas spurned any future gifts: "You bring me another bottle of cologne I'll drink it and die." Reflecting, Dorcas admits that she did not mean for her words to sound as cruel as they did. Still, she finds that she is happier with Acton because he takes an interest in her appearance and personality and is more critical than Joe. Dorcas feels satisfied as she is dancing with Acton and she thinks to enjoy the close moments with Acton because in the back of her mind she knows that Joe is coming for her, though she does not know what that means. She hopes that he will see and understand that she is happy and that she is not his anymore.

Dorcas' mind casts a cursory glance across the room, noting the dancers, people kissing behind curtains, the music and a sudden popping noise. Dorcas sees Joe Trace and notices first, that he is crying and second, that she is falling. Puzzled, she asks herself "Why am I falling? Acton is holding me up but I am falling anyway." She notes that she is being carried into another room, she is sweating profusely and there is a substantial amount of blood. The hostess is upset because her party is ruined and Acton is "annoyed by the blood" on his shirt. Dorcas describes her present mood as "sleepy" and her friend Felice asks her to reveal Joe's name. Dorcas focuses her attention on the faint music of a woman singing in the background. She makes an effort to scream Joe's name to Felice, not so that he might be apprehended by the police, but because she has a message for Felice to relay. Her thoughts return to the woman who is singing and her final mental image focuses on a bowl of oranges, concluding: "I don't know who is that woman singing but I know the words by heart."

Analysis:

Dorcas' repeated words "He is coming for me," fulfill her role as the "prey" that Joe Trace is stalking. In her short narrative, Dorcas shares several similarities with Joe's mother and this chapter also concludes the Eden motif that has been extensively used in the novel. The "rush of foam" and "laughter" of the party resuscitate the images of Wild and Dorcas is like a phantom when her "spirit lifts to the ceiling" and when she brushes Acton's shoulders with "fingertips that stay." This alludes to Wild's previous encounter with Hunters Hunter. In the mixture of images that conclude the chapter, Dorcas is only able to detect traces of what happens around her and, like Joe, she focuses on a faint trace of a woman's singing voice.

Dorcas' prose does not prove her to be the street maven of Alice Manfred's fears and Violet Trace's nightmares. Dorcas is naïve and unsure in her commentary and her rebellious, selfish acts seem to come from her childishness and not from a desire to hurt the people around her. Dorcas is entranced by the party scene and she comes to the conclusion that "this is not the place for old men." One of the ironies of the novel is that Dorcas is a young woman, ferried into the youthful "nightlife" by an older man. It may not be the place for old men, but it is Joe Trace who survives to construct something positive out of his experiences. Dorcas' complacent attitude after she is shot, would suggest that she is comfortable playing a salvific role. Neither Joe nor Acton have significantly altered the "unbearable" nature of her life, and her blood is a "red wash flying from veinsŠfacial makeup patented for its glow. Inspiriting."

The Eden imagery is resolved in two significant developments. First, the apartment is the site of "purple plums" and a dark bowl containing "the pile of oranges" that Dorcas meditates on right before she dies. The fruit of the chapter are "split" and "thrownaway" in the same way that Dorcas' youth is exhausted in Joe's attempts to regain his own past. The second and most notable thematic development concerns the idea of "the Fall." The sin in Eden, the eating of the forbidden fruit, is regarded as the original sin that caused "the Fall of man." While there were previous puns on the word fall in earlier chapters, the puns in this chapter are more numerous and they resonate in the description of Dorcas' shooting. As she enjoys the music, Dorcas imagines herself as a spirit floating to the ceiling. After she is shot, Dorcas is disoriented and confused. She asks: "Why am I falling?" She is falling despite her imaginations and despite Acton's attempts to hold her up. Dorcas' fall provides the spilled blood necessary for the "red wash flying" and Dorcas remains protective of Joe, even as he has wounded her. The idea of required pain is affirmed here because Dorcas willingly takes on the role of the hunted prey, and even if Dorcas is unaware that Joe is simultaneously hunting for his mother and his lover, we can't help but note the irony in her borrowed verses: "They need me to say his name so they can go after himŠI know his name but Mama won't tell."

Chapter Nine:

Summary:

The narrator begins this chapter in the same mode that several other chapters have begun, describing the weather and scenery of the City. It is "the prettiest day of the year" and the weather is described as "Sweetheart weather." The characters on the street are slow in movement, among them, disabled veterans, wagons of food, Ford and Packard cars. On this day, Felice has decided to visit the Traces. She too, has heard Joe Trace sobbing in the windows and she decides to make an effort to cheer him up. Perhaps Joe is crying because Violet has returned the photograph of Dorcas to her aunt, Alice Manfred. Felice makes her visit to the Traces in the middle of her errands. When she enters their apartment, she is carrying the Okeh record and butcher's parcel of meat that her mother requested she bring when returning home.

After Felice enters the Trace's apartment, the story continues in her voice and she offers several details of her history before returning to the present scene. Her parents worked in a town called Tuxedo, far enough away that Felice lived with her grandmother. Felice's parents visit for two days, once every three weeks, and Felice admits that she is often disappointed when her parents come home because her mother is mainly interested in dancing and catching up on her friends' gossip. Felice's father asks that the newspapers are kept in a large stack for him to read whenever he comes home, and this occupies much of his time. Felice recalls the conversation when Dorcas told her that she was lucky because at least her parents were still alive, and she could always go to see them in the case of an emergency. Felice explains that Dorcas' parents "died in a very bad way" and all she has left is "a photograph of them sitting under a painted palm tree." While Dorcas' main thought was that her parents were both very good looking, Felice thinks that the two adults look very sad.

Felice remembers the many occasions when Dorcas was occupied in her "planning and plotting" to deceive her aunt. Dorcas always loved secret things and Felice says that Dorcas played the game of a secret affair unaware that everyone already knew about the relationship because two hairdressers spotted her with Joe at a nightclub called Mexico. Thinking about Dorcas' sneakiness reminds Felice of the weekend when her mother visited town and had to go to Tiffany's to collect something for her employers. Felice remembers that she had to be quiet in the store and that a guard conspicuously monitored their behavior because he was convinced that they were trying to steal a ring from the "velvet tray." When Felice's mother left, the next day, she gave Felice a ring, claiming that it was a gift from her boss. Felice knows that her mother stole the ring from Tiffany's and she appreciates the gesture because her mother is an extremely honest woman, and even though she took the ring after (and because) she was accused of stealing, it was a difficult thing for her to do.

Felice lent this ring to Dorcas, who wore it on the night that she was murdered and when Felice arrives at the Trace's residence, she hopes that Violet or Joe can offer a lead as to where the ring might be, especially because her mother has been asking about the ring. Felice evaluates the older couple and decides that they are good people, that Mrs. Trace is an honest woman and Mr. Trace is gentle, even if he is a murderer. Violet tells Felice that everyone has there only troubles to deal with and that she spent many years suffering, convinced of her ugliness because she had "stories about a little blond child" poisoning her mind. Felice recounts Dorcas' death scene and helps Joe by telling him that Dorcas let herself die; the bullet went into her shoulder and she refused to be taken downstairs and driven to the emergency ward. She simply waited to bleed to death. Later on, Felice visits again and Violet tells her that her ring was buried with Dorcas; she remembers seeing it when she stabbed her in the coffin.

As Violet is in the kitchen, preparing a catfish dinner for the three of them, Joe speaks expresses his gratitude to Felice and tells her that her visits and kind words are helping them get their lives back together. Felice confesses to Joe that there is more information that she has not given him, a message that Dorcas asked her to relay as she was dying. The message is: "There's only one apple. Just one. Tell Joe." Felice intends to cheer Joe up, telling him that he was the last thing on Dorcas' mind. Still, Joe is more sad than pleased. After the dinner, they hear music "floated inŠthrough the open window." The Traces start dancing, "funny, like old people do" and they invite Felice to join in, though she declines. Joe sits down when the music ends and says that the apartment needs some birds. Felice adds that a Victrola (record player) would be suitable as well and that she'll being some records to play for them. The chapter ends with Felice's thoughts about the ring. Even though she knows her mother is proud of stealing the opal to "to get back at the whiteman who thought she was stealing even when she wasn't," Felice decides that the right thing to do is to tell her mother that she knows it was stolen, that she has lost it and that she is grateful not for the ring, but for "what she did." Felice concludes that it is better for Dorcas to have the ring. Her thoughts turning to the approaching summer, Felice looks forward to seeing her parents soon and decides that she will continue to visit the Traces even though Violet puts too much hot pepper in her catfish batter.

Analysis

The image of Felice, walking into the Trace's apartment with an "Okeh record" and "some stewmeat wrapped in butcher paper" comes from the beginning of the novel. The over-eager, zealous narrator indicates that "the scandalizing threesome" of Violet, Joe and Felice is just as doomed as the trio of Violet, Joe and Dorcas‹"what turned out different was who shot whom." Clearly, this has not happened and Felice as fulfilled all of the obligations that her "happy" name entails. Her entry into the apartment, reestablishes the presence of music. After her Okeh record, a Victrola, additional records and a bird follow. And just as Felice entered with a parcel of "stewmeat," her presence restores flesh and youth to the Traces. They are eating again, dancing, and Felice's bodily presence is able to do what Dorcas could not. For the Traces, Dorcas was ultimately a mere photograph and only "the space where the photo had been was real." Violet imagines Felice as "another true-as-life Dorcas" and she is finally able to fulfill her "mother-hunger" by cooking dinners for Felice and offering to do her hair.

In that Felice is also able to repel the falling "ash" and "sooty film" that is gathering around the windowpanes where Joe Trace has cried, she is almost too good to be true. While she has been separated from her parents for most of her childhood, she does not have the orphan trauma that we find in the other characters. She lives with her grandmother, but the grandmother's presence and the monthly parental visits create a nurturing environment for Felice. Like Dorcas, Felice does sojourn into the "nightlife" but unlike Dorcas, she has self-restrictions. She has only heard of the nightclub ("Mexico") where Dorcas was spotted with Joe. Her account is the only one where memory does not evoke pain, where both her two parents and a grandmother can be gathered in the same room. Dorcas, it seems, was doomed to the "trace" motif. Felice reveals that most of Dorcas' memories of her parents were sustained by a sad, faded photograph. Ironically, Felice's world view is so sheltered that she does not comprehend her father's anger because of "the everyday killings cops did of Negroes." She explains, simply, that Dorcas' parents "died in a very bad way' and had to be "fixed up" by the "funeral men" so that they could be presented. She rattles off the taunts that she and others suffer at school‹"hey, fly, where's buttermilk" or "hey, kinky, where's kind?"‹without revealing that she is fully aware of the implications.

It is from this sheltered position that Felice is able to thematically contribute to the novel and provide consolation for the Traces. Felice describes the "fruity smell" of Dorcas' breath and reveals her final word "sounded like Œapple'" and this resonates for for Joe (and the reader), in ways Felice does not realize. She compliments Joe's gentle pats on her shoulder and later gives him the precise details of how his bullet entered Dorcas' shoulder. Dorcas does not know of Joe's wild-woman mother, a woman who had a habit for gentle shoulder-tapping, a woman who tapped her own son's shoulder once and caused him to miss the target at which he aimed his hunting rifle. For Joe, Felice's casual and unknowingly ironic comments could easily tip the scales of memory's pain, repeating the failures of the novel's characters. This time of year, there are young men who scale apartment rooftops to be "holy" like angels, to play clarinet for the old men below and "join the light." They make the music that "penetrates Joe's sobs" and like them, Felice uses her presence to overcome memory's pain. As the previous chapter argued the connection between the body and memory's pain, this chapter proves that a living, present body serves memory far better than a photograph could.

Chapter Ten:

Summary:

The narrator begins the final chapter with an introspective commentary. She sees that she has a "sweettooth" for pain; she is intrigued by how the characters are broken and mended again but in her story, she says, she too was distracted by the City. As if she were her own character, the City fooled her and she "missed the people altogether." She confides that "when I invented stories about themŠI was completely in their handsŠI thought I'd hidden myself so well." As it turns out, they were watching her all along, pitying her loneliness and her need to live vicariously. She admits her fault; she was sure that there was going to be a second murder, the "past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself." Instead, her characters fought to maintain their originality and were completely unpredictable. The trio of Felice, Joe and Violet seemed to be the "mirror image" of Dorcas, Joe and Violet but this is simply not the case. Struggling to dig deeper into their closed "heart-pockets," the narrator realizes that her characters aren't "like dangerous children," as she originally thought. Instead, they were "putting their lives together in ways [she] never dreamed of." The storyteller eventually confesses that she simply does not know what Joe's windowpane tears are for, but she does know that "they were for more than Dorcas." The narrator thought that Joe was tracking Dorcas down for five days, but "all the while he was running through the streets" he was looking for his mother. Joe simply stumbled upon Dorcas. The narrator thinks of "Wild's chamber of gold," the rocky burrow where the woman used to hide from civilization, and she thinks that like Joe, she too would like to visit this place. She hopes to find peace in this rock and Wild "hugs" her and "understands" her and "has given her hand." Having been touched by Wild, the narrator gains the knowledge to complete the story.

Alice Manfred departs for Springfield, thinking of curtains and "a good coat lining." In place of her tea-time conversations, Alice seeks "the cheerful company of someone who can provide the necessary things for the night." Felice remains in Harlem, buying Okeh records and lingering in the streets. This time, the narrator announces that she is not fooled by Felice's "slow" pace. For all of her lingering kindness, Felice will not be used because "she's nobody's alibi or hammer or toy." The Traces are still together and Joe now works at a night job at a speakeasy called Paydirt. While working at Paydirt, Joe watches the City's "unbelievable sky." He returns from work at sunrise, and sleeps through the morning. In the "afternoon daylight," he'll spend his hours with Violet. The have a routine of greeting each other when one of them enters the apartment, just to be sure that this person who has unlocked the door is a spouse and not "a presumptuous neighbor or a young ghost with bad skin."

The Traces have discontinued "night sleeping," and they spend the day taking naps or drinking vanilla malts at the drugstore. Sometimes, they walk the neighborhood streets and over the years, they have become a staple of the scenery, a fixture. Violet is still afraid of "deep holes" and Joe's eyes are still duo-toned and pitiable; needless to say, the Traces spend lots of time at home "figuring things out" and "telling each other those little personal stories." Violet purchased a half-dead and starving bird, whose dying resisted every remedy. "Persistent" as always, Violet finally decided (with Joe's assent) that music was the only thing "left to love or need." Sure enough, after they took the parrot to hear some music, the "bird was a pleasure to itself and to them." As for their friends, the Traces still spend time playing bid whist with Gistan and Stuck and Stuck's new wife, Faye. Joe and Violet sometimes babysit for younger neighbors and they still "let Malvonne in to gossip so she wouldn't feel bad about pretending loyalty and betraying them both." As the chapter ends, the pace quickens and the narrator slides back and forth to memories and recent occurrences that don't have specific dates. The Traces are described as a posing for a photograph, "not sepia, still, losing their edges." The conclusion of the novel completes the narrative introspection begun earlier in the chapter. The storyteller allows the Traces to fade away from her, separated by time and space. She thinks about her view of the world, of "flesh, pinioned by misery" and she says that simply does not believe this anymore. The Traces, in their "grown people" ecstasy, suggest that there is more to life than misery and escaping from it. She concludes with a final confession that she "envies" the "public love" of her characters. She has only known longing and only in secret and has been "waiting for this all [her] life," an unsaid thing that she "can't say aloud" even as her characters are "free to do it."

Analysis:

The final chapter is not as thematically burdened as the others; the story is largely complete and most of the loose ends have already been tied. In the "happily ever after" ending, the narrator does build upon some of the novel's motifs, describing "wells," "cages," "traces" and "birds," but this is done mostly to cement the ideas that have already been presented. The first nine chapters explored one of Toni Morrison's major themes‹the pain of memory, and the "ecstasy" of Joe and Violet, comes form the fact that they are "bound and joined" to one another through memory and are not "pinioned by misery." The central thematic concern of the tenth chapter has less to do with the Traces and more to do with the story, its telling and the storyteller. It is sometimes difficult to separate the novelist from the narrator, especially in a fictional work like Jazz. There are several "third-person" narrators who are contrasted with the "characters," and the relationship between the Narrator and the Character is blurred from the beginning. With writers like Morrison, held by literary critics to be an artist within the contemporary "Postmodern" movement, the questions of narration are critical and these philosophical dilemmas are often brought to life with the aid of the "unreliable narrator."

Morrison's narrator is especially unreliable because there are several and while the opening chapters suggest that the main narrator is a neighbor of the Traces, presumably Malvonne or even Alice Manfred, later chapters delve deep into Virginia memories that this narrator would not know. The first chapters begin with a tabloid-like zest; there has already been one passionate murder and we are told that there is going to be another. Just when things begin to look this way, the narrator veers into the story of Golden Gray, and is increasingly self-conscious. After chapter six, the narrator regularly refers to her emotions in regards to the characters: pity and anger for Golden Gray, distrust for Joe Trace. She begins to voice her questions in the narration, asking what was on True Belle's mind or how was Joe Trace educated to hunt. Unsurprisingly, the narrative responds to the narrator's questions with answers and by the eighth chapter, the narrator is as much of a character as the Traces.

Chapter Nine is especially damning because there has been no second murder, and Felice's few words repudiate most of what the novel has had to say about Dorcas. At the end of chapter six, the narrator says "it infuriates me to discover (again) how unreliable I am" and she joins Golden Gray to make the "we" that approaches the well. She wants to give him "language" and "love" and for this transaction, the narrator must descend into Rose Dear's well. This confusion is finally explained in the tenth chapter. The narrator, again frustrated, initially defies her characters and argues "it's my storm, isn't it? I break lives to prove I can mend them back again." We are struck with the idea that the "razor blade" love, expressed in Golden's surgery, is simply the narrator's display of her power. She has veered the story into Vienna because she could, sliced the young man to make him whole. As she reflects, the narrator feels that she has been trapped by her own possessiveness. Her characters are so vivid that they have truly made her life a vicarious one, the fiction that she calls "my storm." She notes that she "got so aroused while meddling" and now that she realizes that her characters have been watching her watching them all along, "just think about their pity" makes her say "I want to die."

Toni Morrison, makes her final argument for cultural memory's restorative ability is by taking the unreliable narrator who has wished to die and narrating "Wild's chamber of gold." The memory of Wild, of her solitude, becomes a safe place to which the narrator goes for knowledge and peace, blatantly blurring the lines between the story, the narration and the novel. If the narrator can conjure Wild's memory to sustain herself, the novelist can conjure a novel to provide a cultural "memory" of places and people for whom there are few extant historical artifacts, genealogies and documents. The novel ends with the narrator envying her characters for the world she has created for them, and she orders them: "Say make me, remake me." They can create the memory she has "been waiting forŠall her life" and the union that she makes with her characters is confirmed in her final lines: "Look where your hands are. Now."

• Biography of Toni Morrison
• About Jazz
• Character List
• Major Themes
• Short Summary
• Full Summary and Analysis
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 1-2
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 3-4
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 5-6
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 7-8
• Summary and Analysis of Chapters 9-10
• Related Links on Jazz
• Author of ClassicNote and Sources
• Purchase Jazz and Other Works
• Test Yourself! Quiz 1
• Test Yourself! Quiz 2
• Essays on Jazz
• Message Board on Jazz