Youth vs. Age
One of the novel's central relationships is the sustained romantic affair between Joe Trace, a fifty year old man, and Dorcas, who is in her late teens. Throughout the novel, the murdered girl becomes a symbol of youth. Her aunt, Alice Manfred, identifies Dorcas' youth with a budding sexuality that has brought calamity. The motif of the garden of Eden presents the image of Dorcas as a young Eve who is enticed and enticing. Violet Trace's reaction to Dorcas is similar. Her jealousy stems from her husbands affair and she can't help but notice the contrast between her aging, sagging body and Dorcas' youthful, fuller figure. Violet tries to drink malts and eat multiple meals to regain the pounds of her youth and her 'competition' with the dead girl is ironic because Violet does not want to compete with the young, dead child; rather, she wishes that Dorcas could be the young daughter that she never had. Dorcas' friend Felice comes to serve this role for Violet and she also provides consolation for Joe, demonstrating a healthier way in which 'youth' can sustain 'age' without bloodshed.
- Narration and Intertextuality in Toni Morrison’s Jazz. Mahboobeh Khaleghi. Research Scholar, Department of English, University of Mysore, Mysore, India “I am the name of the sound. And the sound of the name. I am the sign of the letter. And the designation of the division.” (“The Thunder, Perfect Mind”, The Nag Hammadi).
- Jul 08, 2020 As far as the matter of the satire of Toni Morrison is considered, she uses this device in almost all her novels paradise”, “The Bluest Eye ”, ”Sula “,Beloved” and “Jazz”. There are many satirical elements in the novel “Jazz” and these can be categorically pointed out.
This can be exemplified through three of Morrison’s works: Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Jazz, wherein characters’ names, the respective titles, and key objects play highly symbolic roles. By providing deeper examination of these novels, it will be clear the immense importance of symbols in Morrison’s literature.
Subthemes: Sexuality, the 'Fall' in Eden, Seduction
Music
The novel borrows its title from Jazz music and the idea of music is discussed throughout the novel. Alice Manfred and the Miller sisters interpret jazz music as the anthem of hell. The passion and pleasure that Dorcas and Violet find in the music is contrasted with the musical treatment of Joe's crime. When he stalks and shoots Dorcas, it is at a party where loud music is being played to incite passion, 'boil' the blood and 'encourage' misbehavior. For the entire novel, music is the weapon that the City wields to control its citizens. The seasons and weather are determined by the presence of clarinet players in the street. Music also bears a sadness that can be juxtaposed to Violet's ribaldry and Joe's flared passion. Wild's disappearance takes place as her body is replaced with a trace of music and this sound haunts Joe's memory for the rest of his life. Similarly, the 'blues man' who walks the streets becomes the 'black-and-blues man' and finally, the 'black-therefore-I'm-blues man,' providing a critique of racism. The 'blues' songs that the characters evoke are largely the consequence of suffering brought about by America's racist traditions.
Subthemes:: Piety, Social Pretension
Memory
Memory is mostly developed through the presence of several orphans in the novel and while Dorcas is the only young orphan in the story, most of the development of this theme actually comes through Joe Trace. Golden Gray and Violet have each lost a parent, while Joe and Dorcas have lost both parents in fires and riots. In Joe's case, he never knew his parents and his 'orphanhood' is defined by his 'trace' of a memory. Joe is an orphan who never knew his true parents and continues to struggle with his memory after he leaves Virginia and comes to Harlem; similarly, Dorcas' memory as a child in East St. Louis IL, is built around a solitary photograph and is fading fast in Harlem.. In the same way that Joe and Golden Gray and Dorcas have lost their parents, Morrison makes the argument that the African-American community as a whole experienced a sort of 'orphanhood' during this turbulent period. After slavery separated families, the 'Great Migration' displaced millions of bodiesfurther separating them from their collective and cultural memories. Memory is definitely the most important team in the novel. All of the major characters, Violet, Joe, Dorcas -- even Alice Manfred, all of them suffer the consequences of living a life that is dissociated from the memories of the past.
Subthemes: Pain, History, Orphanhood
The novel begins in the midst of the love triangle between Violet, Joe and Dorcas. Violet and Joe are unhappily married and living together in an apartment in Harlem when Joe falls in love with a seventeen-year old girl named Dorcas. Joe and Dorcas meet when Joe comes to Dorcas's aunt's house to sell ladies cosmetics, and their affair lasts from October of 1925 to the first of January 1926. Joe talks with Malvonne, an upstairs neighbor, and negotiates the use of her empty apartment so that he and Dorcas can meet there. This arrangement continues for several months and neither Violet nor Alice Manfred, Dorcas's aunt, have any knowledge of the affair.
Jazz Toni Morrison Full Text
Although Joe brings Dorcas presents every time they meet, eventually Dorcas begins to get tired of the older man and starts going out with younger boys, attending parties with her best friend Felice, and making up excuses so as not to meet with Joe. When Joe finally confronts Dorcas about this, she cruelly tells him that he makes her sick and that he should not bother her any more. Dorcas prefers the attentions of a popular and good-looking young man named Acton, with whom she dances at a party on New Year's Day. Dorcas knows that Joe has not gotten over her and will come looking for her, so she is only half-surprised when he tracks her down at the party and sees her dancing with Acton. Joe, however, brings a gun and shoots Dorcas in the shoulder. Dorcas tells the alarmed witnesses not to call an ambulance, even though she would survive if she allowed someone to help her, and she consequently bleeds to death. Everyone knows that Joe shot Dorcas and rumor of their affair begins to spread in the community after the young girl's death. Violet appears unexpectedly at Dorcas' open-casket funeral and slashes Dorcas's face with a knife. Several weeks later, she begins to visit Dorcas's mourning aunt, Alice Manfred, and the two women begin to develop a friendship as a result of their shared tragedy. In the spring, Joe mourns Dorcas's death and he and Violet patch things up in their relationship, mediated in part by their new friendship with Dorcas's best friend, Felice.
Jazz Toni Morrison Characters
As the narrator tells the story of Violet, Joe, and Dorcas in Harlem she follows a stream of associations and digressive details to create a complex web of people, places, and stories extending back to the late nineteenth century. Violet grew up in a poor household in Virginia with her mother Rose Dear. Her grandmother, True Belle, came from Baltimore to live with them when Violet's father abandoned the family. Soon afterwards Violet's mother, Rose Dear, committed suicide by throwing herself into a well. Joe also grew up in Virginia. He was orphaned at birth and raised by adoptive parents. As a young man he wondered about his birth mother's identity and tied on several occasions to find her. His mentor, a hunter named Henry LesTroy and called 'Hunters Hunter,' hinted to Joe that his mother was the local mystery, a crazy homeless rover named Wild. When Joe finally tracked Wild down in the woods he asked her to confirm somehow that she was indeed his mother. Wild responded with a hand gesture that Joe could not make out, leaving him to question his own identity. Joe and Violet met in a town called Palestine where they were working the fields. They got married and moved to Harlem, which is referred to simply as 'the City' throughout the novel.
Jazz Toni Morrison Audiobook
In the course of telling Joe and Violet's story, the narrator recounts the stories of periphery characters such as Vera Louise Gray and her son Golden Gray. The narrator shows the connections between the characters, focusing on the perspectives and experiences of individuals and sometimes allowing them to narrate their stories in their own words. Golden Gray, the mixed race child of a white woman, Vera Louise, and a black slave, Henry LesTroy, was raised by his mother and True Belle in Baltimore. He believed all his life that he was a white adopted orphan, but when True Belle told him the truth about his father, he set out for Virginia to confront Henry LesTroy. When he arrived near Vienna, Virginia, Golden Gray spotted Wild hiding alongside the road. When she turned quickly and knocked herself unconscious, he decided to take her with him to his father's home. Wild was very pregnant and gave birth to Joe when they arrived at Henry LesTroy's house. Golden Gray never returned to Baltimore after this incident but lived with Wild in the woods, totally apart from civilization. These stories about Harlem and Virginia are recapitulated and fleshed out several times throughout the novel in flashbacks and digressions.