TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ: HUNTING AND HIDING IN THE URBAN JUNGLE
TONI MORRISON’S JAZZ: HUNTING AND HIDING IN THE URBAN JUNGLE

Summary/Abstract: Toni Morrison’s Jazz brings to the fore the story of a black couple who, attracted by the dream of freedom, find themselves in the position of seeking social integration in the 1920s Harlem. Setting the novel in the first decades of the 20th century, Morrison inevitably turns the reader into a witness to one of the most significant social and cultural movements on the American scene marked by the Harlem Renaissance and the Jazz Age. The present paper explores the space of the City seen as an illustrative embodiment of both social and moral decay. It seems to accumulate the characteristics of a chaotic and degrading space home to reversed social and moral values, therefore reaching the essence of decay. Exceeding its main background function, the City becomes a consistent character in the novel which acts almost demiurgically. In the urban jungle of the City, individuals are given only two options to survive: hunt or be hunted.

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