Study Questions
- What do the different versions of the Dick and Jane story in The Bluest Eye suggest about the idea of the American Dream as it is played out in the novel?
- Morrison has said that one of the things she tries to do is “translate the historical into the personal.” Focusing on the historical events that frame Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise, discuss the techniques she uses to make such a translation.
- Morrison has been praised and criticized for her portrayals of women in her novels. One of the reasons she has received praise, especially from feminist scholars, is that she breaks with the way female characters previously have been represented in literature and in popular culture. Trace the development of Morrison’s principal women characters in two of the following novels: The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, and Beloved. Discuss these characters in relation to the way African American women are portrayed in either Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Richard Wright’s Black Boy, or James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain.
- Morrison never lived in the South; yet, most of the communities in which she sets her fiction suggest a rural, African American, southern heritage. Taking examples from at least three of her novels, discuss the extent to which the traditions and mores of the rural South condition the behavior of her principal characters in their northern urban environments.
- Some of the themes of Morrison’s novels are derived from folklore and myths. Give a summary of the dominant myths Morrison incorporates in Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, and Paradise and discuss the effect they have on the destinies of Milkman, Son, and the Morgan brothers.
- Morrison derives great pleasure from creating the fictional lives of her characters. Most of them are memorable but certainly not flawless. Some of them behave in ways that challenge common ideas of what is moral and ethical. Develop an ethical statement, based on the given circumstances of at least three of Morrison’s major characters, and launch either a prosecution or defense of their actions.
- Morrison generally is described as a modernist writer. What, specifically, are the narrative, stylistic, and thematic techniques that link her to the modernist movement?
- In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” Morrison discusses what she calls “ancestral figures” in her fiction. What is the relation-ship between those “ancestral figures” and the idea of community as Morrison develops it in Beloved, Tar Baby, Song of Solomon, and Paradise?
- When Morrison was composing Jazz, she consciously was trying to put into writing what she felt had been achieved in music. Keeping in mind the different medium in which she works–written language–how and to what extent does she succeed?
- To what extent has visual imagery—painting, photography, movies—provided themes for Morrison’s fiction?
- Much of the action in Paradise revolves around a “controlling story and motto” created by an earlier generation of homesteaders. Why is it so important for the members of the town of Ruby to keep that story and motto alive?
- Most of Morrison’s fiction is “woman-centered”; yet, she rejects the label “feminist.” What, if any, are the tensions between what she says about feminism in her interviews and the way she develops her female characters in her novels?
- “Synaesthesia” is a literary term referring to a description of one kind of sensation that invokes another sensation; for example, a description of colors that invokes sounds or scents. Some of Morrison’s fiction has a decidedly “synaesthetic” quality. What, specifically, gives The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon that quality?
- What, if any, are the similarities between the narrative points of view of The Bluest Eye, Beloved, and Jazz?
- In Playing in the Dark Morrison examines the erasure of the African American presence in the American literary imagination and calls for a kind of reading and interpretation that is attentive to this presence. In her own critical commentaries, is Morrison able to avoid using the kind of language that led to that erasure? Use specific examples to support your answer.
- Keeping in mind Morrison’s remarks about gender-specific writing, did Morrison in Song of Solomon achieve what she has called a masculine point of view?
- Morrison has insisted time and again that her work is not autobio-graphical and that she writes from her imagination, rather than from what she knows about her family and acquaintances. Define the term autobiography and then discuss it in terms of what Morrison says in “The Art of Fiction CXXXIV” about taking “pieces” from her real life and using them to create imaginary characters.
- Morrison has been praised for what many critics have called her lyrical prose. Taking examples from three of her novels, discuss in detail what constitutes the “lyrical” in Morrison’s writing.
- Morrison often ends her novels with ambiguity. The reader is not quite sure how to interpret her characters’ final actions. Morrison’s practice of leaving her novels open-ended are invitations to her readers to actively engage with her texts rather than passively accept whatever she wants to offer as the definitive interpretation. Take the last paragraph of Song of Solomon and, working from the given circumstances of the text, write your own ending.
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