Racial Archetypes in Toni Morrison's A Mercy

Abstract

The experiences and sufferings that the characters undergo in Toni Morrison's A Mercy assert Carl Gustav Jung‘s idea that the struggle to forget one‘s past is fruitless, and that past had an enormous impact on (black) person‘s life. The characters chose the right way to survive: they experienced the painful process of rememory of their archetypes of complicated and distorted history. The researcher examines black individual‘s quest for identity by demonstrating that past, slavery and stereotypes shaped and determined black individual‘s perception of his/her black identity in A Mercy. This research further argues that Morrison places components of racial archetypes from history of slavery and African-American literature-- in wider American context: by revisiting African American history she revisits whole American history to reveal the importance of the presence of blackness and strong ties between present and past.