Structure

Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self Regard is a collection of essays divided into three parts, one of which is labelled an ‘Interlude.’ The first part is called “The Foreigner’s Home,” the interlude is called “Black Matter(s),” and the third part is called “God’s Language.” Each part contains a number of essays or speeches of different lengths, none of which moves in chronological order. Thus, the book has no time component and the reader for the most part is left to deduce when each was written, depending on the dates mentioned in the piece itself or the historical context. For example, “The Dead of September 11” very clearly speaks to the tragedy of the terror attacks on September 11, 2001 in the immediate aftermath of the attacks, but the essay is first in the entire book despite many other essays being written in the 1960s and...