Recitatif Critical Analysis

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

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 visit her at the shelter and greets her, babying her a little, she thinks then: “I could have killed her”. What is intriguing, is the fact that she mentions a desire to kill her own mother two more times – first, in the chapel, when the mother could not sit still. Twyla describes this moment, saying: “all I could think of was that she really needed to be killed”, she repeats that a moment later, when it turns out that her mother did not bring anything for a lunch. Twyla reflects once again: “I could have killed her.” She is also not empathic to other 's suffering. Twyla is not concerned with the woman who is mute and works in the kitchen, Maggie, who is being humiliated by the older