METAPHOR AND IDENTITY IN LITERARY STYLE: A STYLISTIC ANALYSIS OF THE WORKS OF TONI MORRISON

Abstract

This paper looks at how Toni Morrison combines the use of metaphor, voice, 
narrative perspective and culturally infused lexicons to pattern an idiomorphic 
grammar of style. It is centered on several novels from among the author‘s oeuvre, 
namely The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved and Jazz and utilizes a 
synthesized analytical structure informed by cognitive metaphor theory, Black 
feminist thought movements, narrative theory premises and African America 
vernacular traditions. By closely reading and qualitatively analyzing her style, I 
demonstrate that Morrison appropriates the metaphors of flight, memory, haunting 
and music in order to encode a communal history as well as ethical appeals about 
subjectivity. Her metaphors are not the mere vermilion on the prose. They model 
pronouns, rhythm and focalization; they mediate between story time and memory 
time. Results indicate that Morrison Ian metaphors can be used as identity 
undertaking. They reconfigure the reader‘s sensibility in terms of racialized 
experience, kinship and moral recognition by forcing language to perform social 
memory. The article demonstrates how Morrison‘s metaphors work at both ends of 
the continuum, from micro levels such as noun phrases and verb choices to the macro 
text structure of plot and voice, and formulates an operational model for the analysis 
of metaphor as a carrier or identity in literary style.