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Two Narrative Perspectives In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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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. …show more content…

Better than me. Stronger, tougher” (2004: p.72), or we can read from his point of view how he doubts his manhood while Mr. Garner calls his slaves “men”, “Garner called and announced them men- but only on sweet Home and by his leave. Was he naming what he saw or creating what he did not? …concerning his own manhood, [Paul D] could not satisfy himself on that point” (2004:

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Beloved is a novel that was written by author Toni Morrison. Beloved was published in 1987 by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc., in New York. Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1987. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the American Book Awards, the Anisfield-Book Award, and the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, all in the year 1988. This novel made a huge impact on African American history, and historical fiction, as it covers the struggle of freedom in early lives of slavery.

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Soren Kierkegaard once said, “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.” In this quote, Kierkegaard speaks of the past and how dwelling in events that already happen will prevent a person of living their life in the present. Toni Morrison conveys this message in one of her major themes, showing that constantly wallowing in past memories will prevent characters to move on with their lives. Beloved portrays various sides of cruelty, showing it from a black slave’s point of view to even the owner’s point of view. Throughout the novel, the cruelty that characters experience, whether it be at Sweet Home or from the black community, show the victims’ struggle to move on from the past and the perpetrator’s awareness, or lack thereof, of their own cruel acts.

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A theme central to the novel Beloved is both ideas of family and community. The ice skating passing is fundamental to understanding these themes in relation to the story. Like much of the rest of the novel, Morrison expresses both the positive and the negative parts of events ingeniously. As Sethe is in a state of pure euphoria and Nirvana, a seemingly dark and isolating tone looms to eventually haunt the three of them, as they are trapped with only themselves.

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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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While Morrison depicts myriad abuses of slavery, like brutal beatings and lynching, the depictions of and allusions to rape are of primary importance; each in some way helps explain the infanticide that marks the beginnings of Sethe’s story as a free woman. Sethe kills her child so that no white man will ever “dirty” her, so that no young man with “mossy teeth” will ever hold the child down and suck her breast (Pamela E. Barnett 193) Stamp Paid, a former slave who ferries Sethe and Denver across the Ohio River, tried to take Beloved’s corpse from the mother’s clinging hands and give Denver to her. A mother killing her own child is an act that subverts the natural order of the world. A mother is expected to create life, not destroy it, but with Sethe’s case, she was insane and out of control at that specific moment when she imagined that her child might face the same assault in the future.

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During one of the harshest and most brutal time in history of the United States, many people could not afford to cherish and value some of the things we take for granted today. In the mid 1800s we can see that many slaves live through brutal experiences for which they will never recover. Families get ripped apart, rapes and sexual violations take place daily, murders for the slightest mistake, occur in the lives of slaves for which they can do nothing about. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, we can see characters represent the cruelty of life in Kentucky, Georgia and Ohio in the 1850s to 1870s. Through the story of the main protagonist, Sethe, the story of slaves is shown, from their lives in servitude to what occurs after freedom is obtained.

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In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison you often see a use of words that convey a deeper meaning. “Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on... No matter what.”

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Kamryn Delph 5th Hour AP English Literary Reduction Title: Beloved Author: Toni Morrison Date of Publication: 2004 Genre: Realism Writing Style: Realistic Point of View: Third person omniscient Setting/Atmosphere: The house, 124, and the school teacher's house Plot Development: This story begins at 124 and we meet some of the characters.

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In Toni Morrison’s, Beloved, the author shows the negative impact slavery had on self identity among slaves, particularly female slaves. The main character, Sethe uses motherhood as the sole thing that defines her existence and creates her identity. The situation of being owned by someone is something that Sethe just can not seem to shake. Despite her freedom from actual slavery she does not construct her identity around being a free woman but rather a free mother.

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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.

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As a society we have certain ideas, characteristics, and experiences that we have associated with the word man. As a result, we have positioned and often characterized the man as the abuser, rather than the abusee, and a force of violence, rather than something that violence is forced upon. In turn, we have rendered the man ineligible as a victim of sexual

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In Beloved by Toni Morrison, cruelty factors into the theme, dehumanization in Blacks because Whites employ cruelty to coerce Black slaves to view themselves as animals who serve superior human. Thus, Black slaves gradually start to independently view themselves with the same rights as animals. Cruelty is a noun that consists of the act of inflicting physical or mental pain to others. Accordingly, in Cincinnati, Ohio and Kentucky in the 1850s, cruelty is the factor that forces Sethe, a Black, female slave to turn homicidal and ignore human ethics like gentleness and peace because she does not want to be dehumanized by schoolteacher again. In other words, the cruel savagery in Whites is the source of the savagery in Sethe when Sethe is desperate for freedom.

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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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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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Furthermore, “Paul D made a few acquaintances, spoke to them about what work he might find (49).” Being a man is upholding the responsibilities of being a caring father and husband. Manhood means being able to be at the service of another rather than one’s self. Additionally, Manhood is making attempts to open up and admit your mistakes. Paul D tries to be honest with Sethe about forcibly having sex with Beloved, which was against his will but he didn’t have the strength to prevent her.

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