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Toni Morrison Book Analysis

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Toni Morrison is not your conventional best-selling author. There is more to her than just numerous awards, among which are the Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom, and several literary works. Though known to be frugal with words, her works are thematically rich and full of content, and her latest novel of 2012, ‘Home,’ is no different. The novel, though written in the recent past, is set in the 1950s, following the Korean War, where the main protagonist, Frank Money, suffers from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and tries to fit back into the society. After a long journey, both physically and psychologically, Frank Money finds his way back to his hometown, and strangely he finds the place better than the battlefield. Toni Morrison, an African-American professor, does not hesitate to rub into the novel, albeit subliminally, the plight of the blacks back in the day. This celebrated novelist with several accolades to her name does not disappoint with her tenth novel. Clearly, this …show more content…

It is only after realizing that one cannot escape what actually happened when healing starts because “traumatized victims need to tell their story so as to face the feelings attached to their ghastly memories, which are creating havoc in their daily life” (Ramirez, 129). In Frank’s last soliloquy he sees a beautiful tree which, though “hurt right down the middle” was “alive and well” (Morrison, 98). This only comes after a confession that the girls that were killed by a guard in Korea was his doing, and not the story that the author told. Notably, post-war trauma is not as a result of the suffering that an individual goes through, but the one that they propagate too. Resolution happens when one is able to reconcile what they witness and what they experience during the traumatic flashbacks, both as a victim and as a perpetrator (Pipes,

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