Beloved

When writers use nonlinear exposition, it is not meant to throw you off guard, but instead the purpose is to show a theme presented in the writing. Within the phenomenal novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison uses various different types of nonlinear expositions to help convey the main ideas that Sethe is seen as a loving but also cruel mother, slavery was the indicator that made Sethe attempted to kill her children, and Within the novel, there are times within the text in which motherhood is referred to. The topic of motherhood is illustrating a comparison between a loving mother versus a cruel mother. This can easily be displayed during flashbacks in the book referring to the night Sethe attempted to kill her children. Was it right for her to do such a thing? Was it not? An example of nonlinear exposition in the text is when Denver has a flashback of when she went to school with Lady Jones and Nelson Lord came up to her, and asked if “her mother [got] locked away for murder?” and “wasn’t you in there when she went?” (Morrison 104). The flashback here reminds Denver of when she became scared of her mother, and whether Sethe made the “motherly” choice in killing Beloved.

For a long while throughout the book, the reader was uncertain of why Sethe tried to kill her children. However, it is soon discovered that Sethe murdered her loved one to protect her from the men without skin. When the whites found Sethe and her children, “right off it was clear, to schoolteacher, especially, that there was nothing there to claim” (Morrison 149). The flashback of the night when Sethe massacred her children reveals that slavery was seen as the devil. Sethe would never allow her children to suffer the way she once did, so she had no choice in relieving her children of their last