Impossible Voices: Ethnic Postmodern Narration in Toni Morrison's "Jazz" and Karen Tei Yamashita's "Through the Arc of the Rain Forest"

Abstract

S ome well-meaning adult gave me a copy of Kurt Vonnegut's Breakfast of Champions when I was fifteen years old. An odd choice for a Sunday School graduation gift, I thought at the time, but it turned out to be a wholly appropriate one, for that book was to end the era of my literary innocence and make of me an adult reader. This momentous change occurred as a result of a surprising twist in Vonnegut's use of narrative voice. Breakfast of Champions is a bleak and playful postmodern satire that casts its scorn broadly and erratically upon a debased, violent American culture. It is narrated, for the first three-quarters of its length, by a third-person omniscient voice. The unexpected twist comes late in the novel, when the narrator points our attention to a minor character named Wayne, just out of prison with nowhere to go, as he stands in the parking lot behind a cocktail lounge, idly overhearing a waitress calling drink orders to the bartender. 'Give me a Johnny Walker Rob Roy,' she called, 'and a Southern Comfort on the rocks,' and so on. A few lines later, the omniscient voice continues: