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Chapter 9
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Jazz, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Romantic Love
Jazz, Improvisation, and Reinvention
Motherhood
Racial Violence and Protest
Gossip vs. Knowledge
Summary
Analysis
The narrator wonders if she has a “sweettooth” for pain, a kind of desire for hurt and blood. The narrator thinks she has spent too much time inside, and she resents the fact that even after all this time observing the other people in “the City,” she still doesn’t quite understand them. And somehow, even though she has kept quiet and just looked out the window, everyone else seems to know all about the narrator.
Now, forced to face the evidence of Joe and Violet’s reconciliation instead of the further collapse she predicted, the narrator must admit that the gossip she so eagerly trafficked in revealed more about herself than it did about the people she watched. The lyrical, fragmentary tone of this passage shows just how much the novel has formally aligned with its improvisational, jazz-like content.
Themes
After all, the narrator was convinced that Joe or Violet would kill each other, “that the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself.” But while the narrator was making predictions, the Trace couple was “busy being original—complicated, changeable, human.”
In this essential line, the narrator admits that life is not pre-taped like the music on an “abused record”; the past, in other words, does not dictate the future. Instead, each day is just as changeable as jazz music, which Morrison herself describes as being defined by “improvisation, originality, change.” And so Joe and Violet can defeat the odds, returning to each other and bringing Alice and Felice into their fold, at last finding in middle age the intimacy they so badly wanted in their youth.
Themes
When the narrator sees Joe, Violet, and Felice together, they look just like the love triangle the narrator pictured with Dorcas. But this whole time, the narrator realizes, Joe has been looking for Wild more than for that young girl. Now, the narrator imagines herself into Wild’s cave, with the green dress. She likes the idea of finding peace with this woman who “scared everybody.” The narrator feels that Wild might “see” her in a way no one else does.
Joe and Violet have both, over the course of the story, recognized how their experiences in childhood (and specifically their longing for absent or dead parents) impacts and confuses their adult romantic desires. But now, the narrator realizes that she, too, is suffering from confusion—that the hunger for Wild’s care that she projected onto Joe is in fact a hunger she shares.
Themes
Alice moves back to Massachusetts. Felice still buys records and brings them to Joe and Violet, walking slowly but thinking quickly. Joe gets an all-night job at a speakeasy, and Violet cooks him a big breakfast every morning when he returns. After Violet’s appointments, Joe meets her at the drug store, where they split a malted. Sometimes, the couple will walk around and rest on stoops or take the train all the way down to 42nd street.
If the narrative began with intrigue and gossip, it concludes with normalcy and routine. The reciprocity in Joe and Violet’s relationship is clear in the way they share a malted (as Violet once imagined Joe did with Dorcas) and get each other treats, a shift from the one-sided relationships seen earlier in the novel.
Themes
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Eventually, Violet and Joe buy another bird, and though it seems sick at first, it cheers up once they bring it to the roof to hear music. They look forward to buying themselves a satin blanket, and having that soft fabric cool them after they have sex. Sometimes, Joe thinks back to a day in Vesper County, when he came home to find Violet asleep and tender and childlike.
That Joe and Violet now purchase another bird symbolizes their newly reciprocal love; the fact that the bird loves listening to jazz is a reminder that unpredictability and improvisation are the very building blocks of natural life. The memory Joe has of seeing Violet vulnerable and childlike suggests that the couple is now able to heal each other’s youthful pain, repairing the past instead of letting themselves be dictated by it.
Themes
The narrator feels that Violet and Joe and their story are real to her, almost omnipresent. She envies their public love and reflects that she has only ever loved in secret. The narrator wants to find something like what Violet and Joe have—their ability to share snippets from their past with each other, to say to each other “make me, remake me. You are free to do it and I am free to let you because look, look. Look where your hands are. Now.”
The narrator now relinquishes the gossip that has sustained her—and the novel itself—for so many pages. Instead, she gives herself over to the rhythmic beauty of jazz, with its promise of some kind of freedom and its sensuality, its ability to “make” and “remake” itself all the time.
Themes
