Themes: Strength and Positive Force of Jazz

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The primary significance of jazz is the strength it provides and the positive force it represents. The narrator ends the novel with an affirmation of Joe and Violet Trace, insisting that “they are real. Sharply in focus and clicking.” This “clicking” can be heard in “the sound of snapping fingers under the sycamores lining the streets.” It is in the ankles and hips of young girls, in “the eyes of the old men who watch these girls, and the young ones who hold them up.” It is in response to the records playing on Victrolas.

The characters in Morrison’s Jazz are all listening for that clicking. They sense an absence and try to fill it by searching for mothers, fathers, young love, love lost along the way, or children they thought they did not want. When some finally hear the clicking in a parade drumbeat or sitting in windowsills fingering horns, life does not change dramatically. It is simply real. A fifty-year-old couple shares dinner and a warm bed, entertaining a young girl as they all enjoy her latest jazz recording. A new parakeet will not sing until they take it to the roof “where the wind blew and so did the musicians in shirts billowing out behind them. From then on the bird was a pleasure to itself and to them.”

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Themes: Fear and Power of Music

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