Through concrete imagery, free-indirect discourse, and persistent use of personification, Morrison blends the past with the present, exhibiting Sethe’s fixation on her past losses. Contrasting desolate and more lively images emphasizes Sethe’s haunted reaction to the passage of time. The stark disparity between her dreams and mistaken perceptions and the barrenness of reality grant the passage an extra level of melancholy and creepiness. Sethe’s unsettled past hounds her, especially the loss of her sons. Even after giving up searching “every morning and every evening for her boys,” their appearances hide in the corners of her vision as she mistakes “a cloud shadow on the road, an old woman, a wandering goat untethered and gnawing bramble,” for her lost children (Morrison, …show more content…
The tiredness and loneliness inherent in these images underscores Sethe’s inability to separate the past and present. She searches for children in a yard they abandoned years ago. Sethe’s mistake of an “old woman” for an adolescent particularly stresses her confusion of aging and time (47). The longer she conflates the past and present, the more unstable and non-linear time becomes. Sethe turns away from the outside world and time almost reverses, “their thirteen-year-old faces faded completely into their baby ones,” at least in her mind (47). The feeling of disconnect created by these images culminates the final image of the passage, “two orange squares,” in a field of dark wool (48). While Sethe takes it to show “how barren 124 really was,” it reflects to the reader the removal of 124 from the standard procedure of time (48). These mournful images throw the lightness of Sethe’s dreams into stark relief. In imaging her long gone sons to still be running among “beautiful trees, their little legs barely visible in the trees,” Sethe creates a vision