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Abstract
Over the past few decades, people have come to understand that amputee victims of war can fall victim to such an extreme state of depression that it renders them all but helpless to confront their wartime demons. A version of that illness is also at the heart of Shirley Jackson's and Tony Morrison's works. It is not a missing limb that those authors explore to find meaning. Instead, their focus is on a part of the body that is rather small in size and thus, one might assume, would be the least of the body parts that could render any significant pronouncements about the human condition. Jackson's story was published in 1949, Morrison's novel in 1970, and at first glance, it seems that the two works have not very much in common, except that they each have a character who loses a tooth. Here, Saunders discusses Shirley Jackson's "The Tooth" and Toni Morisson's "The Bluest Eye."