Ripping the scab off in the authorial and authoritative narratives of racial oppression in Morrison's Home

Abstract EN

The unrevealed secrets of America's desegregated army in the Korean War, the racial medical experimentations and the racial oppression against African Americans—involving austere rules of segregation and acts of horrific violence—are all exposed through narrative discourse in Toni Morrison's tenth novel, Home.

The aim of this paper is to investigate how Morrison makes use of dialogic narrative focalizing viewpoints in order to deconstruct the monologic authoritative narrative of the 1950s.

By giving the main character great liberty to question her implied authorial voice, Morrison opens the door to the deconstruction of the unquestionable ideologies and gives narrative agency to the subaltern maimed voices in American history.

Morrison applies a dialogic narrative technique that aims at questioning the authoritative narrative discourse of America in the 1950s through questioning her implied authorial narrative voice.