Abstract
This thesis explores the ways in which African American characters within Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Home, create their own sense of identity and belonging within a society that prevents them from forming their own master narratives. While community is important to each of these characters, members of their respective communities act in ways that are both helpful and harmful; thus calling into question the responsibility that a community has to its members. Viewed alongside liminal theory, post-colonial theory, and through a feminist lens, this thesis attempts to deconstruct the manners in which these novels have previously been viewed, and elicit a response to the new definition of identity that Toni Morrison’s novels put forth.