Toni Morrison's novel A Mercy presents a series of complementary yet competing narratives through which Morrison revisits and reconstructs America's early past. One of the central characters in A Mercy, the English-Dutch landowner Jacob Vaark, acquires a specific status in relation to the events and themes of the novel. Vaark, a complex individual shaped by the experiences of his past and the realities of his present, constitutes for Morrison a canvas on which he draws the forced emigration of a white man from Europe to America, the psychological and ideological origins of the American consciousness and the painful history of a nation founded on the ruins of native cultures and permeated by the ideological propaganda that eventually dominated the history of the Western world. Jacob Vaark is introduced to the reader at the beginning of the novel as an orphan who fled England to escape. from the poverty and misery that would have been his lot in a country characterized by a rigid social hierarchy and laws that aimed to increase poverty for the poor and wealth for the rich. His past was one of rejection, dispossession and marginalization. As a result, this outcast “rat orphan” has now come to seek a better life, “to make a place out of nothing” in the New World, i.e., 1680s Maryland (Morrison12). Understandably, as critic Valerie Babb points out (154), Jacob's experiences as an outcast in England induced in him a sense of empathy for the disadvantaged. As he travels through Virginia to the slave plantation of the wealthy Portuguese D'Ortega, who owes him a debt, he reflects on the unjust nature of the newly implemented laws following Bac's revolt... middle of paper. .....Cillerai, Chiara. '''One question is: who is responsible? Another is Can you read?' Reading and responding to seventeenth-century texts using Toni Morrison's historical reconstructions in A Mercy.'' Early American Literature 48.1 (2013): 178-183. Print.Williams, Eric. Capitalism and slavery. Richmond, Virginia: The University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Print.Wyatt, Jean. ''Failed Messages, Maternal Loss, and Narrative Form in Toni Morrison's A Mercy.'' MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58.1 (2012): 128-151. Print.Karavanta, Mina. ''A Mercy and the Counterwriting of Negative Communities: A Postnational Novel by Toni Morrison.'' MFS Modern Fiction Studies 58.4 (2012): 723-746. Press.Moore Cobb, Geneva. ''A Demonic Parody: Toni Morrison's A Mercy.'' Southern Literary Journal 44.1 (2011): 1-18. Print.Morrison, Toni. A mercy. Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008. Print.