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How Does Sethe Create Suffering In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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“Her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left no room to imagine, let alone plan for more, the next day” (Morrison, 70). In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, she captures the emotion and anguish that the slaves experienced and allows her readers to relive them through her words. Sethe’s past experiences literally haunt her and prevent her from being able to move on to the future. The suffering she felt as a slave, being raped, and murdering her own child interfered with her ability to get up and move on to a brighter future. Every step she took, every choice she made in the past had a massive impact to her actions later on in the book. Killing their own child to keep them from suffering in the …show more content…

That is easier said than done. “I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree” (Morrison, 18). Sethe’s past has both mentally and physically scarred her. The reason that Sethe did what she did to Beloved all goes back to her childhood. “It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what is terrible. I did that” (Morrison, 194). Being a slave led her to killing her own child. She was trying to do what was best for her, but it just ended up hurting her more in the end. It's like the domino effect, all of the bad experiences she had in her life led her to make bad decisions, which had a negative effect on her actions in the present. “But her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day” (Morrison, 70) The abuse, rape, and disrespect that she struggled through took too much space in her mind for her to even think about the future. Not thinking about the future led her to making more poor choices, like trusting that lady who turned out to be …show more content…

When Sethe was a baby she was not nursed by her mom. “Nan had to nurse white babies and me because ma’am was in the rice. The white babies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own” (Morrison, 236). Nursing her children was something that was very important to Sethe because she wanted to have that close bond with her children. When she had her children she got her milk ‘stolen’ from her. “They beat you and you was pregnant?’ ‘And they took my milk” (Morrison, 20). Schoolteacher wanted to see if it was different from a cow’s milk so he conducted an ‘experiment’ on her. It was hard to start recovering from that experience. As she started to look more to the future and move on from that event, her past came back to haunt her, yet again. As she was slowly starting to recover Paul D informed her that Halle watched her get raped. “If he is alive, and saw that, he won’t step foot in my door. Not Halle” (Morrison, 82). It’s like all the walls she had built to forget that moment came crashing down when she found out Halle did not stand up for her. A part of her understood why he didn’t, but it still stung. Getting her milk stolen was very personal, not only because she was raped, but because that was the bond she was supposed to share with her children. She tried not to be like her mother, but sadly she ended up being pretty similar. They both killed their children. When Sethe got

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