Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

Book Review # 104606

African-American Studies
English > Analysis
Literature > American

An analysis of the themes of ghosts, time, memory and trauma in Toni Morrison's "Beloved".

1,814 words () | 5 sources | MLA | 2008 United States

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses how Toni Morrison's "Beloved" offers sometimes confusing allegories stressing the power of the past over what may be bizarre events of the present and future. The paper also examines the ghost in the story, called "Beloved", and how the power of Beloved can be seen in how it forces attention to the past in those who need to exhume it and that whatever or whomever Beloved was, she had worked a kind of magic in evoking the deepest feelings of those with whom she insisted on living. The paper concludes that the surviving adults in the novel must make an effort to overcome their pasts, realizing they are past what harmed them, and transform themselves.

Outline:
124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati
Beloved

From the Paper:

" At the beginning of Beloved, Morrison commented that Paul D had read of an incident in Cincinnati involving a slave woman who killed one of her children when her owner caught up with her, an example of the way in which Morrison added details in a matter of fact way that leaves the reader to knit together the story as he or she will. The manner in which characters arrive and leave is part of Morrison's able way of suggesting fluid time and how characters are often distracted by matters not of the immediate present. For instance, Sethe's son's, Howard and Buglar, ran away in 1873 after years of life with phenomena that made the household a misery. (Beloved 272) As for Paul D, upon his arrival he comes to terms with an obviously haunted house. "

Sample of Sources Used:

Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. R. Janko. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987.
Comay, Rebecca. "Redeeming Revenge - Nietzsche, Benjamin, Heidegger and the Politics of Memory" in Clayton Koelb. Ed. Nietzsche as Postmodernist - Essays Pro and Contra. Albany: SUNY Press, 1990.
Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts, Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction. 17. 1989: 157-167.
Morrison, Toni. "Memory, Creation, and Writing." Thought. 59. 1984: 385-390. Beloved. New York: Plume, 1987.
Nietzsche, F. The Birth of Tragedy. New York: Penguin, 1995.