Self-Cancelling Narratives: Explicit Unreliability and Authorial (Ir)Responsibility in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract

With striking recurrence, Toni Morrison’s novels contain moments in which a confession of unreliability on the part of the narrative voice brings the illusion of a bounded diegetic world to a halt, generating an ontological and ethical instability rarely resolved at the end of the text. This essay explores this recurrent textual phenomenon, tentatively labeled “self-canceling narrative”, using the novels Jazz (1992), Love (2003), and Home (2012) as case studies. I analyze the textual construction of these “self-cancelling” moments as a peculiar kind of explicit narrative unreliability, which is revealed through open confession rather than through the dissonance between narrator and implied author. The hypothesis that such “self-cancelling narratives” are symptoms of authorial (ir)responsibility is proposed, arguing that they place the reader in an ethical impasse regarding their response to the text, which the author refuses to solve. My understanding of the ethical dimension of this textual phenomenon is influenced both by James Phelan’s work on narrative progression and ethical judgments, and by Jacques Derrida’s concern about the “right to absolute nonresponse” on the part of the literary author. In combining narratological with deconstructionist approaches to the textual phenomenon under analysis, I intend to bridge a frequent gap in scholarly work on Morrison, between its identification and description as a narrative technique characteristic of her style, and the ethical, ultimately ideological function it may serve for the author’s literary project as part of the African American tradition.