Open AccessReassessing the Past: Memory and Identity in Toni Morrisonʼs Home
Author(s) -
Ksenija Kondali,
Sandra Novkinić
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
filolog
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2233-1158
pISSN - 1986-5864
DOI - 10.21618/fil2123487k
Subject(s) - narrative , identity (music) , mythology , scholarship , viewpoints , history , aesthetics , character (mathematics) , gender studies , sociology , literature , political science , art , law , visual arts , classics , geometry , mathematics
Toni Morrison’s superior literary oeuvre reconsiders the American past by introducing memories of subjects who have been ignored or misrepresented in official history, with particular attention to their identity construction. This paper aims to examine how the neglected history of African Americans is reconstructed in Morrison’s novel Home (2012) through remembrances of the protagonist, a Korean War veteran. His attempts to recall his personal and his family’s past shape the quest for identity. Concurrently, the narrative about the characters’ fates prompts a deeper retrospective of American race relations and debunks the myth of “the Fantastic Fifties” in the United States. Using scholarship on this topic and critical viewpoints of authors such as bell hooks about home in African Americans’ lives, this analysis seeks to explore Morrison’s novel Home, concentrating on how identity is constructed in the process of the main character’s remembrances of the past and growth toward self-respect