The Accommodation of Afro-American Folk Music as Depicted in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

The Accommodation of Afro-American Folk Music as Depicted in Toni Morrison’s Jazz and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

&nbsp;&nbsp;Jazz written by Toni Morrison and Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison are examples of Afro-American literature which address pain and anger by means of a narrative construction based on jazz music. Both novels depict Afro-Americans who have been hindered by a legacy of cultural separation, personal dispossession, and emotional disturbance since slavery. Surprisingly, both works employ the images of jazz, a musical form which carries a transcendental meaning beyond literal expression as both authors investigate the lives of Afro-Americans in order to clarify their undocumented history. Although it is difficult to establish a relationship between music and prose fiction, Morrison as well as Ellison successfully demonstrate the unique function of black music not only as an explication of black aesthetics and aspirations of Afro-Americans, but also as a reflection of the genuine social, economic, and political realities of Afro-American history.<BR>&nbsp;&nbsp;This paper will demonstrate that the presence of narratives shown in Jazz and Invisible Man are in a pattern similar to jazz music. That is, the linear progressive chronological development of past incidents are not the case in analyzing both of their literary works. Further, any specific structures or patterns in discussing the present without considering the past become insignificant since the pattern of the incidents shown in Jazz as well as Invisible Man progresses in a circular motion without any specific sequences. Again, through the musical mode of the narrative, the personal despair and the historical truth that they rigorously search for are clearly exposed as Morrison and Ellison precisely explore the collective memory of Afro-Americans throughout their works.