THE PROBLEM OF SELF-IDENTIFICATION OF PERSONALITY IN TONY MORRISON'S NOVELS

Abstract

Toni Morrison's work is notable for its emphasis on the problems of African-American national and cultural identity. The vast majority of characters in Morrison's novels represent a relevant cross-section of American society; the writer explores the historical fate of the black population of the New World, the complicated processes of transition from slavery to freedom. In the novels of the early 1970s («The Bluest Eye», «Sula») Morrison explores the destructive aspects of disintegration in the fates of characters who cannot transcend «collapsed communities» and «broken families» and partly fail in their attempts to assert individual independence. Instead, in the novel «Song of Solomon» (1977), the author introduces a character who, in a dramatic search for his own identity, realizes the need to know his people, their culture and traditions. The Song about Solomon in the novel plays the role of a «cultural matrix» through which the protagonist discovers his family history, and through it, the entire history of Black people, with whom he feels an inescapable identity. The song carries a multi-valued «sacred» code that accumulates the centuries-old experience of the people. At the same time, the hero's travels through America contribute to the fact that a kind of synthesis of traditional African and new American cultures takes place in his mind. The painful combination of the «Northern» and «Southern» components of African-American identity is discussed in the novel «Jazz» (1992). The tragic story of the black girl Dorcas and other immigrants from the American South unfolds in the backdrop of the unique atmosphere of New York in the first decades of the 20th century, permeated with jazz, which becomes a specific expression of the complicated «urban» consciousness of African-Americans.