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Beloved, By Toni Morrison

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Toni Morrison the Nobel Prize-winning American novelist changed the idea of the potential impact of slavery in her novel Beloved. Her literary techniques of flashbacks and switch of narration create an efficient system for her to get her point across in both subtle and direct ways. Beloved tells the story of Sethe, an ex-slave, her daughter Denver, and Paul D a friend from the past, and how they are all staying in a house haunted by Sethe’s dead daughter Beloved. In this novel, Morrison insinuates the direct ties between slavery and American history, by not only directly using slavery and her characters to prove the point, but by also using the relationship between Sethe and the infanticide she committed as a model of the relationship. …show more content…

Sethe’s murder of Beloved was something that she worked intensely to hide and also worked very hard to subconsciously make up for. Sethe creates an infatuation with the past based on the her own traumatic one. Sethe dissects the idea of memories and looking reflection to herself frequently. Beyond the idea of reflection Sethe discusses the idea of the past still having an impact on the present world. She believes "Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. . . . But it's not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it's gone, but the place-the picture of it-stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world"(43).” Here Morrison is making a reference to not only the spirit of Beloved having a presence in the material world and on Sethe's memory, but this also connects to the relationship between America and slavery; even though slavery is over it still affects the country. Sethe also bases her views of the future by consistently hiding the pass, "To Sethe, the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay. The 'better life' she believed she and Denver were living was simply not that other one"(51). Sethe believes that the only way to improve the future, and get a “better life” she must “keep the past at bay” which mean she must not let Beloved And what happened to her stop Sethe from protecting Denver …show more content…

In order to maintain this theme realistically throughout the novel Morrison writes in the genre of Magical Realism. This genre allows the past to remain connected to the present, Morrison does this in the only logical way possible a ghost. Something that represents the past while having a direct impact and presence on the future. In this case the ghost of Beloved not only represents the spirit of Sethe’s dead baby, but the experience of the Middle Passage as well. Throughout the novel Beloved makes multiple references that make no connection to the present plot, but when analyzed connect to the experience of the Middle Passage, where people who were indigenous to Africa were shipped to America to be used as slaves. In the end of Part 2 there are chapters of unspoken thoughts from different character. Chapter 22 is the chapter of Beloved’s thoughts this is the area where she most frequently mentions the Middle Passage. She explains “there will never be a time when [she is] not crouching and watching others who are crouching too [she is] always crouching the man on [her] face is dead”(248). This idea of “crouching” is consistent with the fact that slaves were tightly packed on the ships, and the “dead man” on her face is parallel to the fact that the slaves were so tightly packed that live slaves were practically on top of cadavers and vice versa.

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