I missed the people altogether."(Morrison, 167) the narrator perceives his or her flaws in many other aspects, and realizes that the characters and the story have escaped the control of the omniscient fiction: "I was sure one would kill the other...I was so sure it would happen. That the past was an abused record with no choice but to repeat itself... I was so sure, and they danced and walked all over me. Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable -- human, I guess you'd say, while I was the predicable one." (Morrison, 220) Violet and Joe prove thus to have their own minds and act for themselves, without the narrator's knowledge. Thus, the story telling device employed here by Morrison conforms to the postmodernist belief that omniscience can not exist in a text, as the fiction itself is much more powerful than the author. It is impossible for an omniscient narrator to be able to expose all there is to know about the characters and the story itself, and thus to control the narrative from a vantage point. The voice in Jazz attempts to be omniscient in the beginning but gradually becomes so intrusive and self-contradictory that it can not be reliable anymore. Suddenly, the narrative voice, analyzing its own performance, shows that the characters...

That when I invented stories about them -- and doing it seemed to me so fine -- I was completely in their hands, managed without mercy."(Morrison, 212) in a reversal of roles, the author not only looses her omniscience, but becomes a prey to the story and the characters she herself invented. The knowledge belongs now entirely to the fiction itself.
Thus, in Morrison's book, Jazz, the narrator first begins the story in a chatty, self-confident and omniscient voice, like that of the classic, realist novels, but gradually loses his or her independence to the characters in the text that overmaster not only themselves, but the author as well. Thus, the voice behind the story in Jazz is clearly that of the book itself indulging in its own sound and improvising. At the end of the novel, Morrison hints that not only is the author subdued by the fiction he or she creates but the fiction itself will lose its supremacy once the reader will transform it with his own interpretation: "Say 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."(Morrison, 255)

Works Cited

Cutter, Martha J. "The Story Must Go on and on: The Fantastic, Narration, and Intertextuality in Toni

Morrison's Beloved and Jazz." www.luminarium.org

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Vintage, 2004.