Abstract
Toni Morrison (1931-2019) is renowned as the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist. Her third novel Song of Solomon was written in the context of postmodernism, which embodies a variety of postmodern narrative features. Postmodern works are frequently inclined to ambiguity, anarchism, collage, discontinuity, fragmentation, indeterminacy, metafiction, montage, parody, and pluralism. Such postmodern narrative features as parody, metafiction and indeterminacy have been manifested in Song of Solomon. In this novel, Toni Morrison employs the strategy of parody in order to subvert traditional narrative modes and overthrow the western biblical narrative as well as African mythic structure. Meta-narratives are also used in the text to dissolve the authority of the omniscient and omnipotent narrator. By questioning and criticizing the traditional narrative conventions, Morrison creates a fictional world with durative indeterminacy and unanswered problems. Through presenting parody, metafiction and indeterminacy, this paper attempts to analyze the postmodern narrative features in Song of Solomon and further explore Morrison’s writing on the African-American community and its future development.
Highlights
Toni Morrison was the first African-American novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993
Throughout the journals indexed by CNKI, researchers mainly centre on the following aspects: the theme of African-American literature, literary techniques and so on
On the writing technique of Song of Solomon, a study shows that “Morrison expresses her own views of history and thoughts to real life, and intonates a ‘Song of Solomon’ belonging to African American, especially to African American women” (Tang, 2004, p. 174)
Summary
Toni Morrison was the first African-American novelist to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Since the 1980s, western scholars began to pay great attention to Song of Solomon which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, exploring the cultural identity of characters, African-American culture, narrative features and so on. Guo Lifeng and Yang Xiaoli have given a more detailed interpretation of one of the postmodern narrative features, that is, parody. They remark that “Morrison places the experiences of the Black marginalized group in the narrative center under the superficial submission to and identification with the Bible, by allusions to Biblical stories, characters, images and themes” Based on the above ideas, my present analysis of the novel concentrates on the postmodern narrative features, including parody, metafiction, and indeterminacy. It is just indeterminacy that unfolds the essence and spirit of the postmodern narrative, which can be found in this novel
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