Review of Toni Morrison's Novel "Mercy"

Toni Morrison’s novel Mercy takes place in the late seventeeth century, and is included as being “a slave novel”. the story is told in a very mainly way all through the first-person of the main character Florens; which is black, and one of the two servants along with Lina, who is Native American. Some of the sections of the book are narrated by an unknown third person character who provides the observations on the thoughts and feelings of every character in the novel.

There are a lot of aspects and concepts of narration that make the novel very ambitious to sort out and take on the explanations on the setting, events and characters. But what those challenging aspects of narration do is actually contribute to the novel literary and through historical richness. The setting of the novel makes a strong contribution in narrating the story. The novel argues with different story telling. The representation of inconsistent information enabled the author to represent the different effects of trauma each character has, whether it is sexual, socioeconomic, or racial- which can be found in slavery, and that affects the narration of individual personalities. Some certain events are told from different points of view, from various characters that have different ethnic origins. The narrative of the novel and of the story gives an insight in continuous attempts on the part of the reader to process the complex and unclear information emergent from the actual storytelling. Considering the cognitive approach of the language gives an understanding of behavior of the impact of slavery on “black people’s”, identity and there own culture. Also, the narrative of the novel, makes a relationship between individual traumatized situations of characters, and also a social influence of the injustice and oppression of “black people”. A Mercy is a novel that tries to make a separate meanings between racism from slavery, and how it all got to be connected into one. The issues of the race is not only one that the narration is concerned, but also with the reality of gender, social class and religious problematic. The narrative of the novel gives different ways to relate its plot with the “messages” that the novel carries.

The content of the narration is very realistic in every point of view, from the truth of slavery that depicts the racial norms going along with the social class norms. The novel gives a strong impact on the view of the position of the black people in the time of slavery, and after the slavery. Narrative of the book is really different in many ways, by telling the story from the ones point of view that are actually being discriminated and oppressed and not treated as actual human beings.