RC Passage 3 Explanation
This is an explanation for passage 3 of LSAT preptest 66, the October 2012 LSAT. This passage is about Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz. The novel’s structure mimics a jazz orchestra.
This section has paragraph summaries and an analysis of the passage, links to the explanations for the questions are below.
Paragraph Summaries
- Writing has often aspired to be musical, especially in the African-American community. Toni Morrison’s Jazz was the first novel to use a musical genre as a structuring principle.
- In Jazz, the story is structured as a piece of music. The omniscient narrator controls the first person voices of individual characters.
- Duke Ellington kept his soloists under his guidance, even if their solos were innovative. Morrison did the same with her book’s characters.
- Jazz redefines the possibilities of narrative by combining Morrison’s style with a musical structure.
Analysis
The passage is about Toni Morrison’s book Jazz. The bit about music and writing at the start is just context to introduce Morrison’s book; it isn’t the main point. The passage focusses on the book.
You need to understand what ‘narrative’ means. It’s how you tell a story. Some books are first person: the narrative is told through the eyes of the main character. Other books are third person, told through the eyes of a narrator.
Morrison’s book mixes persons. The narration is done by an omniscient third person narrator. Individual characters speak as well in first person.
But….the narrator has total control. The individual characters are clearly contrasted from the main text, by quotation marks.
Jazz is organized similarly to Duke Ellington’s jazz performances. He allowed his performers to do very innovative solos.
But if you listened carefully, Ellington had total control. Every solo had to fit within his overall plan.
The same goes for Morrison’s characters. They all fall within the control of the narrator.
Morrison book was very innovative. She wrote the first novel that used a musical style for its structure.
It’s important to note that we hardly know anything about the plot or theme of the book. All we know is that the book is set in Harlem in the 1920s. The passage is about the innovative structure of the novel, not its plot.
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