I Am Jazz Literary Elements

Memoir/Picture book

America in the early 21st century

First person perspective from the point of view of Jazz Jennings

Overall, the tone is upbeat and optimistic. The mood is one of assured confidence manifested in and demonstrated by the narrator-protagonist.

Protagonist: Jazz Jennings. Antagonist: Gender conventions and expectations.

The conflict at the heart of the story is between Jazz’s assured self-realization that she is a girl and the biological indicators that she is a boy.

When Jazz and her parents meet a doctor who explains that Jazz is transgender.

Before the narrative fully reveals its subject, Jazz admits that though she enjoys all the same things as them, she is “not exactly like” her best friends Samantha and Casey.

“I am not exactly like” her two friends is also an example of understatement for rather obvious anatomical reasons.

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Mermaid imagery abounds throughout the narrative. The mermaid is a recurring symbol in transgender narratives because of the mythical being’s gender fluidity: looking like a girl from the waist up but with a more ambiguous sense of gender from the waist down due to the tail hiding sex organs.

The entire narrative is based on the fundamental paradox that drives all the transphobia and non-transphobic confusion surrounding the issue: Jazz has all the requisite body parts that historically determine gender yet insists she is a girl. This is further complicated for some by virtue of Jazz conforming entirely to gender expectations reserved for girls while still outward manifesting those physical attributes traditionally reserved exclusively for boys.

A visual example of parallel construction occurs on the two-page illustration spread on which Jazz explains she is transgender. She is shown with several pictures she has drawn with crayons. On those in which she is forced to wear to boy clothes, she is angry or sad and the background is dominated by rain. In the drawings in which she is wearing girl clothes, however, she is happy and smiling and the background is always sunny.

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