Toni Morrison Book Analysis

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Toni Morrison is not your wonted best-selling author. There is more to her than just numerous awards, among them the Nobel Peace Prize and the Medal of Freedom, and several literary works. Through 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 home town, and strangely he finds the place better than the battlefield. Toni Morrison, an African-American…show more content…
In times of solitude Frank is hit by images of “a boy pushing his entrails back in, holding them in his palms like a fortune-teller’s globe shattering with bad news” or voices of “a boy with only the bottom half of his face intact, the lips calling mama” (Morrison, 16). These horrid snapshots attack him when he is alone and they keep coming back but only faded when his girlfriend was around. He not only remembers that, but also how he hopped over body parts and how he put a bullet in the brain of a one legged man while avenging for his friend Mike (Morrison, 17). These are images he is so accustomed to such that he would just let them torment him. He cannot escape the violent jerking and thrashing of his comrade Mike, or even the smell of his urine as he died, and neither can he forget how he had to beat away the aggressive birds from feasting on Mike’s body. The “copper smell of blood” (Morrison, 66) is too familiar in his mind, and grotesquely this gives him appetite. He goes on to explain how they literary had to look for Stuff’s arm in the snow and one of his friends could not fit in a stretcher because his remains were too small. The clarity of his description, which shows no ounce of sympathy or sorrow, leaves the reader questioning how broken Frank Money became after Korea. Morrison records that these “abrupt and…show more content…
Let’s go home” (Morrison, 144). This is supposed to signify the end of their different traumas, the point where they both find their peace with the idea of ‘home’ since it is supposed to “extend beyond the material structure of a house into a psycho-emotional space of being” (Freedman, 2). If the reader regards this as the resolution then the outright conclusion would be that Frank Money has achieved healing. However, trauma is a process that is continuous and lifelong, and acknowledging its presence is only one of the first steps towards achieving cure. Triggers are known to cause relapse even after years of breakthrough. The only true test of healing is time, a luxury that the story does not award. It is safe to conclude, however, that Frank has come to a point where he can relate with other human beings
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