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Toni Morrison Setting

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Setting Essay Practice Free Response Item # 11

Toni Morrison sets the setting of Beloved right after the Civil War, which is why the presence of free and slave states, is present in the book. This setting creates the three main themes of the book and this adds to the novel’s literary value. The three main themes that are created are the importance of the past, the impact of community, and the value of family.

Throughout the book the past lives of Sethe and Paul D are brought up many times. Their pasts are brought up because as slaves they experienced many inhumane things that have impacted their lives that they are currently living. The only reason that their past as slaves can even occur is due to the setting Morrison set for the book because before the Civil War slavery was in full force in the south and that is where Sethe and Paul D were slaves in Sweet Home and had to deal with the …show more content…

One of the main examples is when many people of the community come together in the woods to here her preach. The only reason that she is able to do this is because of the setting of the book, after the Civil War many of the freed slaves were still treated unfairly and to stand up for themselves they had to come together which is what Baby Suggs’ preaching did. If the book was set in different timing like say in the 1990s many people would not come together to here her preach because there wouldn’t be a necessary reason to. In fact, the unity of the society is what creates the theme of community in the story, which is what helps Sethe get through her everyday life. Simply put, the impact of the community on the character’s lives is very heavy, and if it weren’t for the setting of the book the community may haven’t even came together and this adds to the literary value by proving the importance that others have on your

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Morrison’s works cause intense reactions from critics. There were reactions from rock bottom to sky high. New York Times thought Beloved was an outstanding novel: “a work of mature imagination- a magisterial deeply moving meditation not only on the cruelties of a single institution, but on family, history, and love” (Novels for students 40). Not all thoughts on her books were as extraordinary as New York Times, some were rather grievous. Critics believed that this book was taken into many levels of racism.

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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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Beloved by Toni Morrison is a prose written after American Civil war. Beloved was written in honor of Margaret Garner; a black slave who was able to run away from the life of hardship and slavery and moved to the free state of Ohio. The writer represented the life of Margaret in Seethe who was the main character of the novel Beloved. In the novel, Seethe escaped from the sweet home where she was slave and moved to Ohio with her daughters; Denver and beloved. Seethe and her children lived in Ohio for 25 days before the people from the sweet home slavery found her.

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