토니 모리슨의 트릭스터: 아프리카의 전통적 영웅 트릭스터에 대한 변용

Toni Morrison s Tricksters: A Variation of Tricksters as Heroic Figures in the Traditional African Folk Tales

This study discusses Toni Morrison’s re-interpretative and re-creative perspectives of the heroic tricksters in the traditional African folk tales. Morrison doesn’t directly transplant her archaic-ancestral tricksterhood into her literary imagination. In the traditional African folk tales, the heroic tricksters who resort to unexpectably witty deceptions, as confronters, disrupters, and reorganizers of the social order, draw attention to the desire of the powerless group for self-assertion and liberation. However, Morrison’s trickster-protagonists are those who keep their resistant wits for survival or liberation in the master-slave relationship. In Beloved, her trickster Sixo is not only a trickster in the African American folk tales plays an oral trick to defeat his white slave owner in the wit battle. but also a tragic hero who loudly laughs at his white slave master while burning alive at the stake. In Tar Baby, Morrison’s other trickster Therese is a motherly trickster who secretly provides an unidentified breaker, Son, into her white master’s house with food without informing her master of the intruder. She is also an ancestral trickster who tricks Son into going to the blind horseman’s forest, a mythical space for African descendants.