As has been suggested throughout this discussion, Tar Baby compares with Beloved, The Bluest Eye, and Jazz as the most experimental of Morrison's novels. Like those books, it is marked by subtle and important changes in the points of view, with consequent shifts in the reader's perspective on characters and events. At every moment we as readers need to be sensitive to the perspective embodied in and surrounding the statements made about the various characters and situations. This shifting point of view allows Morrison to establish simultaneous critical and sympathetic perspectives on her characters. These shifts in turn contribute to the novel's richness as a commentary on the state of race-consciousness in the late twentieth century. At the same time, the shifts cause readers to engage in a process of ongoing re-assessment of their impressions and interpretations of individual characters, to be satisfied with an incomplete theory of...