In 1992, Toni Morrison wrote a book called Jazz which tells the story of mostly four characters. These characters are all being connected in some way to each other by either blood or relationships to each other. The whole story is told from different points of view, but mostly by a single narrator who we don’t know the identity of. This narrator you would think would know all the information but that’s not the case, so you could be misled or told false information by the narrator but you wouldn’t know unless you knew the other sides of that story. Jazz deals with many themes but it mostly deals with the theme of perspective.
When the book begins we get introduced to some of the characters. Those being Dorcus, Joe, Violet, and some other side characters. When this story of Joe and colet being in an unhappy marriage turns into Joe cheating on Violet with Dorcus. It ends with Dorcus telling Joe she no longer wishes to be with him and wants to be with someone who’s the same age as her, not older. Angered, Joe kills Dorcus and at her funeral Violet attacks her corpse. Now when this all happens there’s a feeling of anger towards Joe and Violet, that is until the narrator allows the reader to understand these two characters point of view and the reason behind their decisions. It shows their actions come from a violent and suppressed childhood.
In Joe’s story, it recounts how he never knew his mother and got taken care of by his adopted parents. Joe went in search of his mother and heard she was a homeless woman. When he tracked her down she just told him he could not make out making Joe question who he is. Meanwhile Violet grew up in a poor household with her mother and grandmother who came to live with them when Violet’s father abandoned them. Violet’s mother committed suicide however leaving Violet with her grandmother. Violet and Joe met and after getting married, moved to Harlem. With both of these two characters we can now understand that they both lost their parents by either death or abandonment.
With these characters fleshed out and their stories told through the book, the reader can start to feel sympathy for the characters that they originally didn’t like. Toni Morrison brilliantly makes it seem that she’s showing the reader a story through one version and then lets the reader know another perspective or a history of these same characters. So now the reader has to reevaluate their feelings and thoughts on that character.
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