Beloved One Pager

In chapters ten and eleven of her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison characterizes Paul D as
someone who deals with pain by repressing his emotions and past through the use of
personification and motifs. Paul D does this because of the effects that his traumatic past have
had on him, which is a prominent theme in Morrison’s novel.
Morrison uses the personification of life and death to show the effects of Paul D’s past
and to characterize him as someone who represses emotions as a method of coping. While Paul
D was on the chain gang in Georgia, he and the other prisoners were “singing love songs to Mr.
Death, they smashed his head. More than the rest, they killed the flirt whom folks called Life for
leading them on” (128). This horrible experience of living as a prisoner in Georgia, coupled with
Paul D’s life as a slave, have taught him not to hope. Personifying life in this way and say that it
led them on shows how all of these men have been taught not to hope for too much. Paul D feels
as though he cannot count on having a better future so he suppresses his emotions and by ‘killing
life.’ After Paul D had been a prisoner for some time “Life was dead. Paul D beat her butt all day
every day till there was not a whimper in her… Life rolled over dead” (129). This shows how
Paul D had to work to suppress his hope and feelings. The horrifying experiences of his past as a
slave and prisoner forced him to subdue his feelings in order to survive. Killing life was his way
of eliminating his hope for the future.
Morrison also employs the motif of the tobacco tin to show how Paul D keeps his
feelings repressed because of his past experiences. After escaping from Georgia “It was some
time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister,
the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one into the
tobacco tin lodged in his chest. By the time he got to 124 nothing in this world could pry it open”
(133). All of these things that Paul D keeps in his metaphorical tobacco tin that is in place of his
heart are representative of his past. Paul D chooses to keep his memories locked away instead of
allowing himself to feel, because the horrors of his past have made him afraid to hope for a better
future. The tobacco tin is cold and unfeeling and so tightly shut that Paul D thinks it can never be
opened and his memories will stay there forever. While he is at 124 Paul D “never worried about
his little tobacco tin anymore. It was rusted shut” (137). Paul D never confronted his past or dealt
with his emotions until his encounter with Beloved at the end of chapter eleven when he “didn’t
hear the whisper that the flakes of rust made either as they fell away from the seams of his
tobacco tin. So when the lid gave he didn’t know it” (137-138). Because Beloved represents the
past, this encounter with her forced Paul D’s tobacco tin open and forced him to feel again. This
experience is symbolic of Paul D’s past almost being forced upon him by his arrival at 124,
compelling him to confront his past and open the tobacco tin. The tobacco tin represents the
place where he keeps his emotions locked away, and its opening means that he now has to deal
with those emotions.
Paul D is characterized as someone who does not allow himself to feel or hope too much
because of his traumatic past through Morrison’s use of personification and motifs.