Evocation and Erasure in Toni Morrison’s Paradise: “This dying may take a while”

Abstract

This article investigates the narrative structures of various communities in Toni Morrison's Paradise. The narratives they create to tell their own stories and create their own identities revolve around two distinct physical spaces, the communal Oven and the Convent (why capital letters). Morrison's novel questions how memory works to provoke both narrative continuance and discontinuance simultaneously, to both evoke and erase history and memory.