Ross Murfin defines postmodernism as “A term referring to certain radically experimental literary and artistic works after World War II” (Murfin 397). According to Murfin, postmodernism, like the modernism that preceded it, involves separation from dominant literary convention through “experimentation with new literary devices, forms, and styles” (397). Jazz by Toni Morrison participates in this departure from literary norms, a historical novel that describes the life of black Americans who lived in Harlem in the mid-1920s. Jazz embraces the postmodernist style through its unconventional use of narrative that incorporates a unique stream of consciousness and the narrator's identification with the physical text itself. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Stream of consciousness, though popularized by modernists like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, takes on new eccentricities in postmodernist works like Jazz. While not without nuance, jazz includes sections of lyrics that are not the lyrical, meticulously crafted streams of consciousness as seen in Ulysses or Finnegan's Wake; Morrison's narrator can approach the violence and disorder typically untapped in modernist works. The Bedford Glossary states that postmodernist works often embrace a level of “cacophony and chaos” (Murfin 397), and this can especially be applied to the stream-of-consciousness narrative of Jazz. A prime example occurs when Violet sits in a corner store, brooding over her husband's mistress and her own deteriorating mental state. As the narrator mediates his thoughts and Violet becomes more agitated, the narrative discourse changes. Grammatical conventions fade as sentences continue or end abruptly, paragraph breaks stop altogether, and profanity becomes frequent as ideas become less eloquent and more guttural, as if they were staccato notes in the narrator's song. Finally, the narrative makes a dramatic change in point of view, leaving the third person "she" and adopting the first person "I". A paragraph that is as thoughtful and lyrical as the rest of the text begins to morph into phrases like "...keep me down and out of that coffin where she was the heifer who took what was mine, what I chose and chose and determined to have and keep, NO! that Violet is not someone who walks around the city, up and down the streets wearing my skin and using my eyes shit, no, that Violet is me!” (Morrison 95-96) Morrison, using not only diction and rhythm but changing the very rules and perspective of his narrative, successfully conveys not only the thoughts but the unstable and chaotic emotional state of a character postmodernist stream of consciousness: going against modernist conventions to portray the often unpredictable and tumultuous machinations of the human mind Despite the undeniable sensitivity and agency presented by the narrator, it would be problematic to qualify them as having the “human mind” of the characters they describe, since the. Jazz's narrator is not human. Morrison, in the same way that he breaks literary conventions in the style of his narrator's voice, also brings a postmodernist element to the identity of his narrator, creating a narrator who is not within the world, but not entirely distant from it. The last pages of Jazz confirm their true nature, addressing the reader directly: “For a long time now I have observed your face, and I have missed your eyes when you turned away from me. Talking to you and hearing you respond: that's the beauty of it” (Morrison 229). The narrative is mediated. 397-398.