Analysis Of Toni Morrison's Recitatif
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Toni Morrison 's Recitatif is overall quite a puzzling short story. It is not only on the accord of its inconsistent storyline, which concentrates on the moments when the main character, Twyla, interacts with the girl that she met at St. Bonaventure shelter, but the main reason of confusion is Twyla herself. Throughout the story she remains almost numb, not even once showing any type of a fierce emotion or deeper feeling. Twyla is mildly disgusted when she meets Roberta for the first time. She recalls: “I got sick to my stomach. It was one thing to be taken out of your own bed early in the morning- it was something else to be stuck in a strange place with a girl from a whole other race”. It does not stop her, though, from befriending the girl and feeling comfortable around her. Twyla makes the impression of being detached, she accepts and uses social and religious conventions, little bits of personalised knowledge from her mother and information that she can gather from her environment, until entirety of that knowledge becomes more of an inconvenience and is no longer beneficial to her. She is also showing elements of antisocial personality disorder. Twyla more than twice mentions her desire to kill someone without any further remorse and due to truly trivial reasons. It is clearly visible in the fragment when the girls are introduced to each other. Twyla thinks: “if Roberta had laughed I would have killed her”. There is also an example of when Twyla 's mother comes to