Strangers By Toni Morrison Analysis

The psychological test, “The Sally-Anne Test” was devised to better understand the human mind. In 1985, it was found that autistic children were unable attribute mental states different from their own to others. These children were unable to recognize that another person, with a unique perspective and distinct mind existed. Later it was proven with similar tests that other intelligent animals, such as elephants, dogs, and chimpanzees were not able to perfectly pass the test, effectively proving humanity alone possesses the ability to fully understand the individuality of the mind. However, despite being alone in the ability to distinguish individuals, people still find primal comfort in conformity, and will reject their ability to recognize …show more content…
When the narrator first meets the stranger, the narrator fails or refuses to remember the stranger’s name, dubbing her “Mother Something”. After conversing on the neighbor’s wall for 15 minutes, Mother Something lies to the narrator, implying “the owner of the house lets her come to this spot anytime she wants to fish and comes every week” (Morrison 76). Mother Something’s presentation as the experienced wise woman crumbles in the mind of the narrator despite Mother Something only conversing for a short period with the narrator, because the narrator has already constructed a mental image of Mother Something too great to maintain based on cursory observation and dialogue. While the image of a stranger reveals much about them, their motivations, dreams and desires remain unknown and previous experiences with people similar to the stranger creep into the mental construct of the stranger to compensate. On some level, a part of one’s self projects onto the stranger in order to make familiar and less scary the unknown quantity of the foreign. For this reason, the name the narrator creates for the stranger implies a blank slate for which the narrator to project her wants and desires onto to make familiar the stranger. The narrator later becomes self-aware of this reality when she poses “Isn’t that the kind of thing we fear stranger will do? Disturb. Betray. Prove …show more content…
The second subject from Bergman’s A Kind of Rapture, the man with a tattooed dagger appears to be in front of a bus stop based on the reflections in the advertisements. The man’s gaze is more directed towards the camera in this image compared to the last image, and the intensity of the gaze is less severe. The layers of clothing and scarf indicate colder weather, and the tattoo immediately stands out on this man’s face due to its size, its apparent age and the fact that imagery of weapons on a person’s face could be a gang related. While for the previous picture the camera was placed below the stranger to indicate the subject’s place as higher up or holy, the camera for this picture is at the same level as subject’s eyes. A possible explanation for this is that the stranger seeks simply to be seen as an equal to the viewer. The gaze to the side, fade in the tattoo and location of a bus stop may represent the desire to move on from the past, and to make a new future, but similar to the first subject no definitive conclusion can be drawn from those. The unique experiences of the man are in some way shared by Bergman’s photograph, yet cannot be fully understood because uniqueness of his situation. The physical dissimilarity to most of viewers because of the facial tattoo juxtaposes the man’s life with that of the viewers, creating an