Abstract:
Toni Morrison's Paradise employs a narrative perspective that moves between characters, demonstrating their disparate experiencings of reality resulting from differing perspectives. To achieve the effect of a limited narrative perspective, Morrison employs (communal) free indirect discourse as a narrative mode in which the voice of a character or group is fused with the voice of the narrator, often times so subtly that the exact point of these voices' convergence and/or divergence is difficult to determine. (Communal) free indirect discourse allows Morrison's narrator to utilize a narrative mode that places her/him in the experiential field of the character or group while still preserving the authorial mode, thereby limiting the narrator's perceptions to those of the character.
To illustrate that limited perspective and limited understanding result in misdirected violence as ultimately manifested in the Convent raid, Morrison delineates the differing ways in which the Ruby fathers and sons understand the words on the Oven lip, the Ruby community's shared and inaccurate perception of Billie Delia as a sexually promiscuous youth, the level of crisis for each of the Convent women, and the Convent women's ceremony of unification and salvation, about which the Ruby men know nothing.
Through the use of a shifting narrative perspective mostly absent of omniscient commentary, and frequent employment of(communal) free indirect discourse that reinforces the understanding that the fragmented narratives are positioned within the perspective of a particular character or group, Morrison forces her reader to develop her or his own understanding of events as the novel begins, to constantly revise this understanding as the novel progresses, and to finally adopt the privileged position of a non-limited, fully informed narrator with panoramic comprehension of all perspectives. Consequently, Morrison's reader must explain, comment upon, and interpret the events of the novel, thereby participating in the construction of its meaning.
