![]() ![]() The unnamed narrator is a central, if mysterious, character in Jazz. ![]() ![]() Breaks are indicated in this synopsis with additional line breaks. The novel bridges the post–Civil War era and the post–World War I generation in its portrait of the Harlem Renaissance and the New Negro from the inside out. The skills, knowledge, and information that they acquire as they mature in the southern countryside both equip and disable them for their lives as urban residents. Joe and Violet have to negotiate the stories from their pasts that continue to haunt them and to define who they are even as they begin, or try to begin, new lives in the city. The couple is at the center of the novel’s investigation of the complexities faced by those millions of African Americans who moved from the rural South to the North during the great migration in search of jobs and a better life in the cities. The novel tells the story of the New York neighborhood Harlem from the perspective of its ordinary inhabitants, namely Joe and Violet Trace. The woman was dead the next day and so intentionally did not betray her lover, the man who had murdered her. The idea for the novel originated with a James Van Der Zee photograph of a dead teenaged woman who, knowing she was dying, told her friends that tomorrow she would give them the name of the man who had shot her with a silenced gun at a rent party. Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations. ![]()
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