Comments on Style

When reading a book I’m usually very particular about needing to know who is talking and whether or not it’s happening in the past, present, or is a speculation of the future. I know myself well enough to be fairly certain that I would be put off this book if someone described the style of writing Morrison uses. There’s something about the way she writes; the style is not quite stream of consciousness, not quite typical narrative and honestly I don’t know how to classify it, but it does works for me as a reader. It’s the flow of things, it’s not choppy but more like a river that gently takes you along with it that makes it work. Especially the part when Denver tells Beloved of how she was born. If I went back I could probably pick out the spot where the story changed from bring narrated by Denver to being narrated an omniscient third party, but I never noticed the change as I was reading, it was that subtle. That’s the aspect that impresses me the most about Morrison as an author. To have a reader’s attention so fully that you can slip that kind of thing past them is very impressive and, I imagine, hard to do successfully.
If I have any complaint about this book, it’s that I don’t see where it’s going. Most books that I’ve read in the past have a very specific purpose that means something to the characters – a goal they are trying to achieve. I don’t see a set goal as such for this story, although I’m beginning to think it’s not that clean cut. I know in class Prof. Cruz encourages us to think about the effects of color, gender, and the time period the book is set in, and I wonder if that’s the entire point of the story; to make the reader think about those things and their effects. But that in itself raises the question of how deep the audience is supposed to read into the words. I always get stuck with the question of how do I know if I’ve gone farther than the author intended?