The second section of Beloved becomes more and more absorbed in what Sethe ambivalently describes as "rememory," and in what Paul D metonymically calls a tobacco tin rusted shut in his chest. The novel's narrative structure remains grounded in 1874, the narrative present, but this present becomes progressively more swamped in obsessive, intrusive memories of the past. Paul D's presence in an 1874 storefront church, for example, prompts vivid memories of his last days at Sweet Home. Sethe's nurturing promises to the adult woman Beloved in this year serve as backdrop to Sethe's memories of her own mother. Memory and present-time juxtapositions are within the boundaries of sane, rational reflection and reflexivity, but they are also so doubled-over and enfolded in such radiant, enduring pain that the characters cannot pay more than nominal attention to their mundane struggles for a living in post-Reconstruction Ohio.
Coming as it does toward the end of the section, Beloved's disjointed, stream-of-consciousness narrative makes the other characters' sense of chronological disorientation seem merely an attenuated version of her own. Her prose-poem/free verse images, apparently of a slave-ship capture, her mother's suicide, and her sexual captivity aboard-ship, are more difficult to piece together than those of other characters, since the staccato images contain fewer attempts at sequential narrative structure. In other words, this initially seems a mad piece of writing. But on closer inspection, the structure resolves into a fun-house mirror, more compressed, perhaps, but similarly proportioned to the narrative's progress up to this point. That is, while Beloved's narrative at first seems startlingly different from anything the text has yet presented, it is highly congruent in its fixation on past events, and in its memory-repression sequences from other narrative points of view.
As the third section of the novel opens, past and present briefly merge. Sethe, Beloved, and Denver barricade themselves inside their home, running out of food and money as winter sets in. Boundaries between past and present, between the "crawling-already" baby girl and the adult woman Beloved, even between separate characters, seem to collapse from Sethe's perspective. Yet the narrative voice here truncates description of this madness, as if it is still too painful to talk about. Sethe's blissful, unreasoning conflation of past and present, self and other, lasts a mere five pages. Further, this section of the text is narrated from a sane and reasonable third person perspective. Verb tenses indicate relative time frames; people are correctly identified by their given names; cause-and-effect sequences are described or sufficiently implied. The consciousness of Sethe within this brief section of the novel may be mad by some standards, but the narrative voice makes no effort to mimic that state of consciousness.
A more puzzling lacuna is the question of Beloved's identity, one never fully accounted for in terms of literal narrative. Although the conventions of the gothic genre may dictate that the adult woman Beloved's comings and goings remain mysterious, as if draped in chiaroscuro, we ask: Was there a ghost? Was Beloved, the woman, the same person as the spiteful baby poltergeist whose antics open the novel? To read a return of the repressed into the dual characterization of Beloved makes satisfying sense as a symbolic construction. But to perform this reading, we must locate ourselves outside the literal plot in the position of analysts, making sense of disconnected story parts by rendering them signifiers within an enclosed psychic economy. The story is doggedly literal. Was there a ghost? Sethe, of course, sees it. Her daughter Denver sees it. But if the ghost functions as a return of their repressed trauma, then why does Paul D, too, witness this ghost at the novel's beginning, when he has been separated from Sethe for eighteen years, and when at this point he is unaware of the reason for there to be a ghost?
On this, the novel is silent. No other portion of the plot confirms or denies the literal presence of occult spirits within this narrative world. Were the text to confirm ghostly presences as real, and Beloved (or some portion of that amalgamated character) as a ghost, then Sethe, Paul D, and Denver would be identifiably sane. Were the text to deny ghosts as real -- even if it did not account further for Beloved -- then the sane characters would be mad, at least in respect to their belief in her existence. But the issue of Beloved is not addressed again except as a metaphor for the angry dead of slavery. Either narrative choice would provide a degree of closure which the novel's anteceding genre, the slave narrative, cannot allow.
