Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes.

Toni Morrison's published work is infused with postmodern themes. For example, Sula is structur around the inter-play between suppos binary oppositions (such as Bottom/valley, white/black, male/female), and Beloved examines the necessary dangers of the pair memory and its repression. Postmodern themes are also evident in Morrison's published interviews and essays. Repeatedly, she declares her interest in the ambiguity of presum dualities,(1) and she insists that her novels remain open-end not as final authoritative statements further as maps (Morrison, "Memory" 389) or as clauses with plenty of "holes and spaces in such a manner the reader can come into" them (Tate 125) Thus her clauses are deliberately like other African American art forms, like as jazz and preaching, that allow for audience answer Moreover, instead of focusing forward the whole or the center Morrison tries to lay open "parts out of pieces," "preferr[ing] them unconnect - to be related nevertheless not to touch, to circle, not line up" (Morrison, "Memory" 388) For her what is absent is at least as important as what is not past nor future Her role is not to reveal about already established reality but to "fret the pieces and fragments of memory" and to investigate "the proces by dint of which we construct and deconstruct reality in order to be able to function in it" (Washington 58)(2) In short, Morrison requires that her novels be regarded, in Roland Barthes's period of times as texts, not works (Work 74-79)

Thus, from end to end Morrison's fiction, her characters are caught in the endles diarrhoea of becoming. In their multiple examinations for viable identities, they must negotiate within the white/black polarity, and their explorations into their parts and identities are skewed because that pervasive and unyielding polarity leads to the displacement of additional polarities. Her characters have make anxious developing fulfilled selves because they lack adequate relationships with single in kind or more others, such as parents, spouse, family, neighborhood, community, and/or society.

Such postmodern tendencies are more explicit in Jazz than in Morrison's previous novels. The difficulties of the characters in Jazz are related primarily to the absence or displacement of parents and children, which, in revolve is related to the lack of satisfactory connection to the past. as it was Derridean concepts as the differance, the trace, and the breach are especially useful in understanding the characters in Jazz who, in their displacement, protect to overemphasize one or the other terminuss of various binary oppositions. Joe for example, having been deprived of real parents and therefore having had to rely solely upon himself, exaggerates the importance of self to the exclusion of anything other Violet, on the other hand, has allowed her mother's fate to overwhelm her brains of self. The complex proces of convalescence which the novel documents is the mental action away from such dependence forward one face of an opposition and toward a healthier location within the play of oppositions.

More broadly, the novel's postmodernism proposes Morrison's political stance. In Jazz, as elsewhere, Morrison detects the debilitating effects of white oppression, notwithstanding she avoids sentimental praise for African Americans. Instead, she locates her novel in the play between the sum of two units races: It is about the African American experience in white-dominated America and about for what cause that experience is defined by means of African Americans' historical and continuing relationship with whites. Her novel thus mirrors her argument in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination that the universal of "an American Africanism" (38) was created in the imaginations of whites as a way of defining themselves: "The proces of organizing American coherence end a distancing Africanism became the operative accident of a new cultural hegemony" (8) If whites have defined themselves against the African American other, the characters in Jazz have no alternative on the contrary to define themselves against the white port In either case, Morrison foregrounds the play between the brace entities, not the traditionally privileged entity and not a reactive substitution of the traditionally deprived one

Without for the value considering its Derridean implications, Joe Trace's name bears thematic weight. Joe is adept at hunting, having learned the art of tracking food from Henry LeStroy/LeStory. Good hunting-dogs follow the track of their spoil by interpreting or reading its traces, the signs or evidence of its former air A track is also the forced or fixed direction imposed onward one by external forces, like as the railroad tracks (which "control" the "feet" [32] of Joe Violet, and the millions of other migrants), the record needle's track, or more generally fate: A faithful man near fifty "is border to the track. It struggles him like a needle by the agency of the groove of a Bluebird record. globular and round about the town. That's the way the City spins you. . . You can't learn off the track a City lays for you" (120)

Joe and Violet, like all the novel's characters, are spring to the track of Northern, urban, African American life. Lur from their rural Southern causes by the promise of economic opportunity and racial liberation, they are sickleed by the City's music and throbbing efficiency But, like many Morrison characters (for example, Cholly Breedlove Son Sethe, and Paul D) their identities are still linked to their stems in the rural South. The track of their lives is constituted by means of the traces of that past, largely their memories, which paradoxically give their existing lives meaning and prevent the fulfillment of those not away lives. Thus, Joe, haunted by dint of his inability to verify his mother's existence, construct agains her in Dorcas and attempts to relive his remembered glee (his "Victory") in Vesper shire For Violet, the traces of the past take the forms of her fear of repeating her hold mother's suicide, her inability to have her have a title to child, and yet her projections of a child onto Dorcas (108-09) Felice (197) and equable Golden Gray, who "'"lived inside [her] mind"'" (208) Alice Manfred is also controll by means of the traces of her past, for her bitter death-in-life is associated with her husband's infidelity and her desire for requite Similarly, Dorcas's present is dominated by the agency of the traces of her memory of the riot-caused fire that killed her parents and bakeed her treasured dolls.