Author Type

Graduate Student

Date of Award

2017

Document Type

Thesis

Publication Status

Version of Record

Submission Date

October 2026

Thesis/Dissertation Advisor [Chair]

Hagood, Taylor

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s later novels Love and Home bring forth an issue of identity anxiety for those involved in the narrative: author, narrators, and readers. Featuring both first-person and third-person narrators, these works offer conflicting narratives in which the writer, Morrison, allows her characters to question her own authorial voice. Greater agency is given to the first-person narrators through which they deconstruct the traditional objectivity of third-person narratives. As such, this thesis argues, the structures of Love and Home extend their inside conversations to the real world of readers who must reconsider where their narrative trust has been. Moreover, Morrison’s challenge to her authorial voice becomes the means through which she questions the hegemony of U.S. historical narratives. In the end, it is the subjective voices of the first-person narrators which offer a more reliable, counter narrative of not only Morrison’s fictional stories, but that of the nation’s historical past.

Extent

77 p.

Comments

Includes bibliography.|Thesis (M.A.)--Florida Atlantic University, 2017.|FAU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Collection|Includes bibliography.

Identifier

FA00004995

Format

pdf

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