ABSTRACT
Though twenty years separate the publication of Toni Morrison’s Jazz (1992) and Home (2012), this chapter endeavors to put these novels into sustained conversation.
First, both novels employ unreliable narrators who invite readers to ascertain the relationship between narration and ethics and to understand how questions of U.S. citizenship and personhood have become critical facets of literary fiction. Second, the plots of both novels feature violent individuals whose transgressions induce us to juxtapose the need for accountability against the contextualized transgenerational histories of raced characters. Third, Jazz and Home represent opportunities to consider the parameters of the ethics of oppression and subsequently the kinds of endeavors the oppressed must undertake to recover dignity and self-worth. Finally, both texts evince Morrison’s commitment to using her novels to eradicate the sin of innocence.
By situating unreliable narration in the context of moral repair, Morrison’s novels invite us to set aside the ethics of the oppressed in favor of an ethics of othering that seeks to establish a shared language in which “othering,” as a verb, denotes a path to cultural health.
