In relation to my trust concerning the narrator of the short story “Recitatif”, I must say that up until the point, where Twyla´s and Roberta´s versions of a shared childhood story clash, I found the narrator to be quite believable. The fact that these completely different recollections are overlapping and as a result even Twyla, the narrator, expresses doubt about her memory ( “I wouldn't forget a thing like that. Would I?”) makes me believe that one of the main themes discussed by Morrison is insecurity and the instability of memory. As I was reading the story the second time I felt like the narrators voice changed and grew up just as the character evolved. At the beginning the narrator uses expressions such as, “gar girls”, “legs like parentheses”, … ,that sound just like an 8 year old girl talking, while the story proceeds, the narrative style changes according to the character growing up. Although Morrison establishes the setting by giving certain hints, which seem to point to a time line between the 1950s to 1980s ( example: Roberta ridicules Twyla because she does not know who Jimi Hendrix is) she never reveals the race of both characters, as well as what actually happened to Maggie, which leaves the reader again with doubts. It is at times very frustrating but certainly a way to get the reader to interpret the story in his own terms and to lead us to reread and rethink everything over and over again.
In relation to my trust concerning the narrator of the short story “Recitatif”, I must say that up until the point, where Twyla´s and Roberta´s versions of a shared childhood story clash, I found the narrator to be quite believable. The fact that these completely different recollections are overlapping and as a result even Twyla, the narrator, expresses doubt about her memory
ReplyDelete( “I wouldn't forget a thing like that. Would I?”)
makes me believe that one of the main themes discussed by Morrison is insecurity and the instability of memory.
As I was reading the story the second time I felt like the narrators voice changed and grew up just as the character evolved. At the beginning the narrator uses expressions such as, “gar girls”, “legs like parentheses”, … ,that sound just like an 8 year old girl talking, while the story proceeds, the narrative style changes according to the character growing up.
Although Morrison establishes the setting by giving certain hints, which seem to point to a time line between the 1950s to 1980s ( example: Roberta ridicules Twyla because she does not know who Jimi Hendrix is) she never reveals the race of both characters, as well as what actually happened to Maggie, which leaves the reader again with doubts.
It is at times very frustrating but certainly a way to get the reader to interpret the story in his own terms and to lead us to reread and rethink everything over and over again.