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Traumatic Experience in Toni Morrisons’s Novels “A Mercy” and “Jazz”

Summary/Abstract: The article aims to demosnstrate how famous Afro-American writer, literary critic and Nobel Prize laureate T. Morrison (b. 1931) revisits African- American history and black individual’s search for identity from African American standpoint in the novels Jazz (1992) and A Mercy (2008). The interpretive method of the novels combined with literary and psychological approaches to literature demonstrates that the writing techniques, such as non-linear narrative, flashbacks to past and Afro-American narrative techniques enhance the importance of the relationship between present and past and help to revisit Afro-American history. The analysis of the novels shows that the memories of past, although traumatic, serve as a healing power for black individuals who managed to revisit their complicated individual and collective past and history in order to construct their black identities in American society.

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