Essay on Multiple Voices in Morrisons Song of Solomon -- Song Solomon

The Significance of seven-fold Voices in Morrisons Song of Solomon Of the various manifestations of voice that participate in the interplay of voices in Song of Solomon, I would like to name three - the fib voice, the signifying voice, and the antiphonary voice - each of which is dialogized within itself and in relation to the others. In the enterprise scene of the novel, the third-person omniscient narrative voice emphasis added informs us that at the clipping of day that Mr. smith plans to fly from the roof of Mercy Hospital, word-of-mouth intelligence just lumbered along (3). This explicate non only encodes the black uncouth but also immediately directs the readers worry to the cultural, communicative process by which the conjunction structures itself. Interestingly, the phrase appears in the second sentence after Mr. Smiths differentiation about his planned flight appears in the text. Thus, it abruptly shifts the readers attention from the spectacle of Mr. Smith to the linguistic confederation of which he is a part. For this community, word of mouth is both a mode of communication and a category of knowledge upon which its members depend. The phrase also stands in contrast to the written word of Mr. Smiths note and therefore, paradoxically, points to his contract as a suspension of the normative, just as the description of the community that follows the phrase suspends the reader, along with the curious crowd of onlookers. On the one hand, the narrative voice contextualizes the act of an individual with the attendant communal response on the other hand, it concurrently informs the reader and abdicates any totalizing ability to do so. perchance more importantly, however, in the litany of information about how the bl... ...significance to the listener. By paying attention to how identity is constructed dialogically rather than monologically, the reader hears and celebrates the voices that Toni Morrison both directly and indirectly enacts in the text. But this process also enables the reader to critique those cultural hegemonic forces that shake up silenced some voices in the first place. A dialogic reading not only encourages the reader to relinquish interpretations which reduce the African American community to a monologic, manageable entity but discourages the reader from coming to closure as well easily. Works Cited Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Call and Response Voice, Community and Dialogic Structures in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, in Toni Morrisons Song of Solomon, in New Essays on Song of Solomon, ed. Valerie Smith, Cambridge University Press 1995, 41-68. 42-43