Themes In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Song Of Solomon

Novels written by Toni Morrison are rooted in themes that are fundamental in order to appreciate the African American life, background and struggle. These themes delve into problematic relationships, and hardships encountered by African American people. Love as a recurring theme in the novels of Toni Morrison has a noteworthy place. This kind of extreme love not only happens as parental love but also shows itself as others forms of love. In this paper, I will deal with The Bluest Eye, Beloved, Song of Solomon, and Jazz.
Raised in the town of Lorain, Ohio, in the 1930’s and 1940’s, Morrison uses the background in her novels. Lorain was an African-American town. People were poor. Morrison’s family had a profound influence on her. All four of

The novel reveals the lives of its two main characters, Sethe and Paul D. Both are former slaves and both are trying to create lives for themselves in the wake of decimating and pervasive personal histories. Both are forever marked by the legacy of their individual experiences with American slavery. The portraits of Paul D and Sethe created by Toni Morrison in Beloved confront the questions of what it means to be a man and also what it means to be a mother when the basic elements of freedom and humanity are denied. These questions are always difficult but are rendered nearly impossible to answer with the lack of autonomy and choice that defines slavery. Even when the characters are no longer literally enslaved, their thoughts and actions are haunted by their memories of their earliest and formative experiences as someone else’s property. In Beloved, there is an attempt to enter the consciousness of individuals who were enslaved and to animate the feelings that must have been associated with so much uncertainty, loss, and violation. In the novel, that personification is made manifest in the character Beloved. Beloved can be seen as a representation, a personification of all the trauma and catastrophic human cost of the Middle Passage and slavery. According to Morrison, the idea for the novel Beloved originated with the historical narrative of MARGARET GARNER, a woman who in 1856 ran away from the farm where she was enslaved in Kentucky. When she and the others she escaped with were followed and discovered by their owner, Garner tried to kill her children rather than have them re-enslaved. She succeeded in killing one of her children, and her subsequent trial became the subject of national controversy particularly as concerned the issue of