Essays on Tar Baby

Summary- Tar Baby (Toni Morrison)

The novel Tar Baby, by Toni Morrison, explains the story of the extremely debatable quandary of the racially separated African-Americans in America and the inherent practice of social discrimination inflicted on then due to racial prejudice. The novel uses the character of the Protagonist, Jadine, who faces the communal allegations of betraying her own race because she abandoned her real culture and gave up her racial heritage to pursue her dreams. This reflective summary of the novel focuses on the part (pages 231-275) where Valerian (the white owner of entire household and master of all the blacks) realizes about ...

Summary

Tar Baby by Toni Morrison is a novel that talks about the discord among the whites and the blacks, and the learned biases and prejudices that the characters accord each other. The story highlights these biases based on three different levels: race, gender, and class. The Street household was an interesting setting wherein a mixture of the black and the white, of the slaves and the masters, and those in between live under on roof. The story starts with Valerian and Margaret talking about the menu for the coming Christmas Eve. Valerian had invited some people and his, Michael, ...

The novel by Toni Morrison, Tar Baby, is a tale of the disputable plight of racially segregated African Americans and the underlying discrimination based on the racial prejudice and biases. The conflicts presented in the novel are portrayed in the character shades of the protagonist, Jadine, who is charged with an act of racial sedition as she pursued her dreams by abandoning her true culture and racial heritage. The novel uses the polemic viewpoints present in the character of Jadine to delineate the racial prejudice which exists at a different level of interaction within the society. Morrison’s primary ...

Summary of Tar Baby

The novel “Tar Baby” tells a story of two love birds, Jadine and Son. When the story starts, we are introduced to Son as he jumps off a merchant ship and swims towards a harbor. Unable to swim to the shore, he clutches onto a nearby yacht and sails away. Upon landing, Son finds himself in a small highland called Isle Des Chevaliers, where a rich man named Valerian Street lives (Morrison, 1). Son then decides to creep into Valerian’s house and hides in Margaret’s, (Valerian wife), bedroom. After an argument with her husband about his habit ...

Tar Baby was one of Toni Morrison’s novels that demonstrated how she perceived the African American experience. Right at the start of the novel, the reader is introduced to a yet unnamed man who jumped from the Stor Konigsgaarten, intent on reaching the shore of Queen of France. It was a tough decision for him, as swimming through the current proved to be difficult, such as the instance when he was yanked by the water into an empty tunnel and turned three times when he struggled to rise out of it (Morrison, 4). He found an alternative in ...

Summary of “Tar Baby” :

Tar Baby is an interesting novel in that it is the love story of two black individuals. Typically, in literature we have seen the plight of the interracial couple explored; however, in Tar Baby, we see the plight of a couple within the Black race explored, (Morrison, Tony, pg. 3). Tar Baby essentially highlights the hierarchy within the Black classes as the two characters explore their potential to have a viable love affair. What ends up transpiring as a result is that the characters face the fact they often feel homeless in the world around them because it is ...