Despite the number of self-inflicted deaths in Toni Morrison’s novels & the fact that she wrote her master’s thesis on alienation & suicide in Faulkner & Woolf, there has been little critical attention given to the repetition of self-destruction in her works. This essay reviews Morrison’s novels & argues that suicide operates on two revolutionary levels: within the story as a political form of resistance & within the narrative structure as a discursive strategy around which meanings revolve. (78 refs., 32 notes)