6/28/2023 0 Comments Jazz by Toni Morrison![]() ![]() In one instance, she sat down in the street and remained there, inexplicably, until people carried her to safety. Violet’s outrageous action at the funeral did not surprise local folks, as she had become notorious for strange, even alarming behavior. ![]() ![]() At the funeral, Violet, Joe’s fifty-year-old wife, attempted to mutilate the dead girl with a knife but was restrained. Thus, the narrator reveals, upfront, that on January 1, 1926, fifty-two-year-old Joe Trace shot and killed his seventeen-year-old lover, Dorcas Manfred, in Harlem. In subsequent chapters, the characters individually elaborate on this story. As a jazz piece begins with a complete melody that various solo instrumentalists then improvise upon, so Jazz sets down its quasi-complete story in the opening chapter. With a nod to its title, numerous literary critics have described Jazz’s nonlinear structure as improvisational. When Joe takes a lover and kills her, the tragedy precipitates a collision between past and present, paradoxically resurrecting Joe and Violet’s relationship. ![]() While the city surrounding them surges with music and vitality, Joe and Violet Trace experience loneliness and despair as their marriage sinks under the weight of past injuries. Toni Morrison’s 1992 novel Jazz opens in Harlem, New York in 1926. ![]()
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