ABSTRACT
Morrison, like Faulkner, uses fiction to unpack the fictions of tradition, particularly the selected tradition of the South, particularly the fiction of the pleasant, easygoing plantation. Like Faulkner, on whom she wrote a Master’s thesis, Morrison tells stories that contain ghosts as well as people the reader may not wish to meet. The going inside the plots, for both writers, does not make for easy reading, because more-much more-than plot is at stake. The reading-demands these writers make on an audience are such that readers are forced to complicate their assumptions not only about people but about history and memory, knowledge and innocence, good and evil: about themselves. For these two Nobel Laureates, fiction exposes the fictions of the American character, pressing readers to shatter their illusions, to read less straight, possibly even to think the unthought (Britzman, 1998a).
