Racial Perspective of “Recitatif”.docx

Racial Perspective of “Recitatif”肖Abstract: Toni Morrison, the Pulitzer Prize and the American Book Award winner, is a major voice in Black writing. All of her novels are, in a sense, “historical novels”, in which characters, as Barbara Rigney(1991) has put it, are “both subjects of and subject to history, events in ‘real time’, that succession of antagonistic movements that includes slavery, reconstruction, depression, and war.” Recitatif is the only short story she has written, it has mainly been studied in terms of unreliable narrator, racial relations, and narratology, and related perspectives. In her short story “Recitatif”, Toni Morrison reveals the dilemma and struggle of the black people as she always did in her fictions, because her works, to a large extent, are accounts of official history, hidden from which she gives voice to voiceless people. As Wiser writes, “Morrison values the influence and power of her heritage, recuperating historical, lived moments in African American history to fill in the blanks.” In this short story, she never points out which character is black, which is white, between who there are some rather poignant conflicts, creating many indeterminate and absent elements, as well as individual anxieties, altogether compose a big myth of the short story for the readers, which is one of Morrison’s central themes in her works. Myth, together with blackness, compose “Recitatif”. In general, all of Morrison’s protagonists exist “in a world defined by its blackness and by the surrounding white society that both violates and denies it.” There is violence in “Recitatif”, but there is no direct description of violence which could only be felt and really hurts. It is more about psychic violence, “The destructive effect of the white society can take the form of outright physical violence, but oppression in Morrison’s characters, for the brutality here is less a single act than the systematic denial of the reality of black lives.” With a purpose of