The Story Arcs of the Trilogy: Time and Memory

Memory is a highly-charged emotional experience for Morrison’s characters in the Beloved project, and it becomes a vast theme for readers to grapple with as well.  Questions of how much love is too much or not enough in Morrison’s trilogy project frequently intersect with another set of exigencies: how must the demands of remembering and…

“Black people . . . have been simultaneously deprived of time and fixed in it by the color of their skin”  —James Baldwin In Black Time: Fiction of Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States (1981), Bonnie Barthold states that in much African American literature, there is a practice of “making time” in the face…

  We read and reflect on Morrison’s characters’ senses of time and memory, as we explore in Rhythms of Memory in Beloved, Jazz, & Paradise  and Making Time.  But how will readers experience the time of reading the narratives? This blog will address this question: How do narrative elements such as flash-backs draw readers into experiencing…

Just as the sea’s rhythmic waves refresh two exhausted figures lying together on a seashore in the epilogue to Paradise, they wash over us as well, as we’re finishing not only an unresolved-but-hopeful novel, but an unresolved-but-hopeful trilogy.  My chosen language, “unresolved-but-hopeful” was not chosen to be glib; nor am I lazy in grabbing at…