The final section of Morrison’s Jazz truly allows readers to appreciate the difficulty of expressing the experience of observed individuals. This struggle stems from the absence of primary knowledge and description of events, something that can only be truly gained by having experienced an event in the first person. Although Morrison is able to articulate varying scenes and emotions exemplified by the characters (Joe, Violet, Dorcas, etc.), she also admits restrictions held on a third-party narrator. “I thought I knew them and wasn’t worried that they didn’t know about me…They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered hopelessness. That when I invented stories about them—and doing it seemed to me so fine—I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy…So I missed it altogether.” (Morrison, 220) Not only does this profession hint at the hopeless nature of describing experience second-hand, it also serves to infer that various accounts of seemingly true experience may in fact be the creation of gap-closing on the part of the narrator, making it essentially unreliable.
This brings up a significantly relevant question in regards to our classroom experiment: how are we to express the experience of others? It is apparent now that secondary explanation of first hand experience holds little merit, and that other modes of expression must be created. Although Morrison’s implementation of the unknown narrator held, admittedly so, a myriad number of faults, I believe she was on to something in regards to using the “beat” of Jazz and its “instruments” while writing the novel, and this creative mode of expression should be further investigated.
