RC Question 15 Explanation
DISCUSSION: It’s clear that this passage expects you to be confused about how Jazz the book mimics the musical structure of jazz music.
We don’t know much about the book or how it uses jazz music, if at all. The book doesn’t used jazz music as a metaphor. Morrison’s book doesn’t describe a jazz performance. In fact, we know nothing about the plot of Jazz.
The point was that Jazz has a unique narrative structure. Narrative is how Morrison tells the story. She has a central narrator controlling when and how the individual characters can speak. This is similar to Duke Ellington’s performances.
___________
- The passage isn’t about the plot, theme and setting of Jazz. It’s about the structure of Jazz; the book was written like a piece of jazz music.
- Morrison didn’t describe a musical ensemble performance. She structured the narration of her book as though it was a piece of jazz music.
- Morrison doesn’t use jazz as a metaphor. She uses the structure of a jazz piece to guide how she narrates her story.
- The passage doesn’t say if Morrison uses her jazzlike style of narration in any other books.
- CORRECT. See especially paragraphs 3 and 4. The main point of this passage is that Morrison was the first to write a book that used a style of narration drawn entirely from a musical genre.
I found choice (D) confusing. I crossed this out, though, only based on the first part “Building on the works… composers” because there was no evidence that Morrison got this idea from other artists; Morrison was the first one to even attempt using a musical genre “as the structuring principle for an entire novel” (10-14), and there is no proof in the passage that she was influenced by anyone else (except Duke Ellington, a jazz musician, and Mr. Ellington alone clearly isn’t enough to justify the plural “many African American writers and composers”) in arriving at this style.
However, the second part of this answer choice beginning with “Morrison has over the years” seemed flawless to me. So are you saying that “over the years developed” in this answer choice indicates that Morrison used this style in her other previous works?
You were right to disqualify choice D upon reading the first part. As for the second part, we don’t know since the passage didn’t tell us if she used this style of narration in any other books.