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Beloved By Toni Morrison Essay

584 Words3 Pages

Each writer has his or her own special style of writing, some sort of technique that sets them apart from everyone else. Toni Morrison excels at scrambling the events the order in which the reader is presented information. This style of writing creates a tougher book to read, but also a more rewarding reading experience. In "Beloved", by Toni Morrison, Morrison uses nonlinear exposition to create a sense of chaos through out the book, provide her audience with multiple points of view, and provide context for the current or upcoming events.

It is apparent to the reader early in the book that the family is borderline insane. Sethe killed her own daughter whose spirit now haunts the house, Paul D is incredibly short tempered, and Denver, while …show more content…

She reveals new details about the character's lives and then incorporates a flashback to explain the relevance of said details. Essentially, the book starts in the middle. The flashbacks through out the book fill in the past and new knowledge is constantly fed to the reader. One example of this is the death of Sethe's daughter Beloved. During the first chapter of the book, Sethe says, "She wasn't even two years old when she died"(5). This leaves the reader wondering how and why the baby died. This information is slowly reveled throughout the book, with small details coming here and there. But the big reveal isn't until much later in the book. There is a flashback to a shed, with Sethe and her children inside it. Sethe then kills Beloved, and attempts to kill her two sons as well. This reveal has more of an impact on the reader at the end of the book rather than if it would have been placed at the beginning because throughout the book, the reader is developing his or her own ideas about each of the characters. After reading this passage, any ideas the reader has about Sethe will have either been confirmed or blown to bits. Morrison uses this technique to surprise the reader and keep them on the edge of their seat while reading her

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Her feelings only grow when she reads the newspaper and finds the Harmon trial on the front page. She quickly goes to get her kids in panic fearing that they are in danger. She is too late, by the time she is in the backyard, they are gone and all that is left is Missy's red mitten. She goes into shock and has a hard time speaking and remembering. Throughout the book she is in shock and the police have to drug her in order to help her remember her past.

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I feel like this section of this book dives deeper into the theme of loss of innocence, and into the the coming of age theme. At the beginning of the section of the book, while Baby was returning home with her Father Jules she made the statement that ‘’The clouds got thicker and gray over us .The calm before the storm made me feel excited. It gave me the feeling things were about to change.’’(O’Neill 90). This quote really foreshadowed the aspect that things are going to change in Baby’s life.

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In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the author often utilizes many different writing techniques to emphasize the story’s main idea that one cannot let past mistakes dictate one’s life and future. Morrison’s application of nonlinear exposition in Beloved helps convey the novel’s main theme by allowing the reader to witness Sethe’s journey to self-acceptance through her personal flashbacks and Paul D.’s point of view. From the beginning, the author incorporates a flashback to illustrate how Sethe is burdened with guilt from killing her baby daughter. Morrison makes it clear to the reader that Beloved is constantly on Sethe’s mind.

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A key feminine quality for women in general around this time period was their capacity for being a mother. Throughout the story, Beloved is one of the many memories that haunts Sethe which she tries to repress in vain because she attempted to murder her own child in order to save them from the same physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that she endured during her time working at Sweet Home. However, Morrison depicts this as an act of kindness. Sethe 's character is given a connection to the audience for her motherly instincts, but also a way for the audience to reflect on the fact that her attempted murders were out of motherly love and protection. Placing Sethe in the scope of many women of the time who had lived without the harshness of slavery are forced to confront the weight of a decision that they never had to make nor most likely ever will.

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Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

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The character Beloved is an anomaly in the story, and is the whole crux of the plot of the story as well. Her name, or lack thereof, is allegorical and the most defining character trait that she has throughout the whole book. As a character, she is a mysterious entity who latches onto Sethe and her family who feeds off their attention, and reveals little to nothing about who she is. Besides these traits, her name leaves most readers to believe that this character is the ghost of Sethe’s unnamed baby that she murdered; as we know the baby’s headstone has the word “Beloved” written on it due to Sethe misinterpreting what the pastor said

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1. Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories.

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As the book ends Paul D returns, and finds Sethe laying down in Baby Sugg’s bed ready to die (70). Sethe cried out to Paul that she lost the most meaningful person in her life, Beloved (70). Paul D then hugged her as he told her she was the best thing to ever happen to him (70). Instead of Morrison writing about families being separated, she writes about them being sold as if they were livestock (71). Morrison chose to write about the African-American experiences during slavery (Heinze 127).

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Beloved by Toni Morrison is a deep soul touching novel that tells the story of a mother who loves her children intensely that she murders one of them to save her from the exposure to cruel slavery. This act is not accepted among members of the community and in return the community shuns the members of 124. Slavery forced Sethe to take an action towards extreme measures with her baby daughter not thinking about future affects it could have upon her other children. The novel moves us back and forth through multiple flashbacks to see the perspective of Sethe, Paul D, Denver and Beloved allowing us to further understand how and why they behave the way they do. Although Denver is indirectly affected by slavery, it still remains a strong component

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Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.

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Beloved places historical trauma at the center of American race relations and reveals two denials of historical trauma through unveiling the violence. The racist institutional power denied the violation of African American lives, and the black society refused to admit the truth of African American familial self-destruction and self-hatred. And so American racial trauma became submerged. Morrison ' s Beloved is a revelation of this trauma portrayed by apocalyptic events, such as infanticide.

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The characters in Beloved, especially Sethe and Paul D are both dehumanized during the slavery experiences by the inhumanity of the white people, their responses to the experience differ due to their different role. Sethe were trapped in the past because the ghost of the dead baby in the house was the representation of Sethe’s past life that she couldnot forget. She accepted the ghost as she accepted the past. But Sethe began to see the future after she confronted her through the appearance of her dead baby as a woman who came to her house. For Sethe, the future existed only after she could explain why she killed her own daughter.

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