The Meaning of the Narrative Often Resides In the Formand Point of View of the Tale, Rather Than In the Actual Story or Chronicle of Events.  Discuss With Reference To Beloved.

    Toni Morrison allows us to read the ‘unspeakable thoughts unspoken’ as we are shown inside the minds of Sethe, Denver and Beloved.  The Section which details the thoughts of Beloved, lacks punctuation and is written as a stream of consciousness, to help to portray the inner mind of a two year old child.  The reader is unsure when it is set giving the prose a timeless quality, the gaps on the page reflecting Beloved’s gaps in experience, ‘she fills the basket  she opens the grass   I would help her but the clouds are in the way’. Added to an already complex text is Toni Morrison’s use of Beloved to represent all those who were lost and ‘disremembered’.  Beloved’s internal thoughts take us to the ships that carried slaves from their homes and describes the horrific conditions that they endured, ‘small rats do not wait for us to sleep someone is thrashing but there is no room to do it in  if we had more to drink we could make tears’.  Beloved becomes the embodiment of those who did not survive whose names and stories are not remembered.

    The novel begins and ends with the character Beloved who is represented in various forms, as a ghost who then seemingly takes on the flesh and blood appearance of a twenty year old girl and through memory as a ‘crawling already’ two year old child who dies at her mother’s hand.  The fact that Toni Morrison does not provide a clear cut picture of who Beloved actually is and we are never certain if she actually is the physical manifestation of the murdered child; a pitiful victim of the inhumanity of slavery or an malevolent spirit who excludes Paul D and Denver and consumes Sethe, gradually draining her life away through the retelling of the past; makes it difficult for the book to be categorised.  The supernatural elements contradict its realist qualities yet it is based on the historically true story of ‘Mary Garner,.a slave who killed her child and attempted to kill herself rather than return to slavery’ 

    This inability to speak about certain things is also shown in the book through the various images used to describe the horrifying scars on Sethe’s back, Paul D sees it as ‘the decorative work of an ironsmith’, while Amy says it is a ‘choketree’ and Baby Suggs describes the marks it leaves on the blanket as ‘Roses of blood’.  This example emphasises how a whole culture suppressed their pain so as to enable them to cope with life but Toni Morrison also shows the painful reality of Sethe’s back when Paul D realises that it ‘was in fact a revolting clump of scars’, she does not allow the truth to hide in euphemisms but forces the reader to experience the reality of Sethe’s disfigurement.

    Though the novel is set 8 years after slavery it deals with the subject of slavery and much of the story is set during the time of slavery.  The disorder that is found in the novel emphasises the destructive force that slavery had on people’s lives, not only the slaves but also the slave owners and shows that the ending of slavery did not right all wrongs.  The constant intrusion of the past on the present shows that not only can the characters not escape the past they cannot escape the effects of slavery even though it is now ended.  The book demonstrates that ‘The characters have been so profoundly affected by the experience of slavery that time cannot separate them from its horrors or undo its effects’.

    Toni Morrison’s use of suspense in Beloved is also important as the reader tries to discover the full horror of what has taken place.  The novel creates a ‘series of narrative starts and stops that are complicated by Sethe’s desire to forget or ‘disremember’ the past’.  Our desire to know what has happened is hampered by Sethe’s desire to forget.  As Linden Peach states ‘The backbone of the novel is an occluded text buried within the surface narrative which the reader has to recover in order to make sense of the whole, as Sethe has to reclaim it also to understand the main events of her life’.  As well as this holding back of information in the novel, the omission of a character also helps to communicate the book’s story.  Toni Morrison deliberately relates Halle’s deeds and allows the reader to know the character without actually meeting him.  Like the other characters in the book we too feel the loss of Halle by his absence from the novel.

    At the end of the novel Toni Morrison on one hand gives the reader a hint of a conventional happy ending by leaving us with an image of Denver going out into the world, while Paul D asks Sethe if he can ‘put his story next to hers’, on the other hand reminds us through the use of a cryptic ending that there was no happy ending to slavery.  Toni Morrison intentionally leaves the reader with an unresolved ending in order to show that there was no clean and simple resolution to slavery for those who had suffered, ‘The paradox of how to live in the present without cancelling out an excrutiatingly painful past remains unresolved at the end of the novel’.  The ambiguous phrase, ‘It was not a story to pass on’ can be interpreted in two ways, either as a story that should not be retold as it is best forgotten, or a story which must not be simply passed over, but which must be remembered.  This is perhaps the message that cannot be avoided in a story about slavery, that it is too painful to remember yet too important to forget.  Toni Morrison’s book Beloved somehow captures both these meanings and makes ‘slavery accessible to readers for whom slavery is not a memory, but a remote historical fact to be ignored, repressed or forgotten’.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved London: Pan Books, 1988.

Peach, Linden Toni Morrison London: MacMillian, 1995.

Samuels, Wilfred D. Hudson-Weems, Clenora. Toni Morrison New York: Twayne Publishers, 1990.

New Casebooks. Toni Morrison Ed. Linden Peach.London: Macmillan Press, 1998.

Icon Critical Guides.Beloved Ed. Carl Plasa Cambridge: Icon Books 1998.

Darling, Marsha Jean. “Ties that Bind”: Review of Beloved and “In the Realm of Responsibility: Interview with Toni Morrison”. Offprint No.12330.

Mobley, Marilyn Sanders. “A Different Remembering: Memory, History and Meaning in Beloved”. Offprint No.23535

Smith, Valerie. “‘Circling the Subject’: History and Narrative in Beloved”. Offprint No.22496.

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