Beloved is one of the best novels to come from the hand of the Noble Prize winner

Toni Morrison. It captures the gloomiest and most shameful period in the short span of
the American history, slavery. It is a story of slavery and freedom, identity and racism,
blood and murder, love and sacrifice.

The protagonist of the novel is Sethe, and all the events of story revolve around
her and her family. She was born to an African woman, whom Sethe never knew, and she
started her life, as all black girls at that time, a slave in a large plantation called Sweet
Home owned by Mr. Garners. The Garners treat their slaves fairly humanly compared to
other slave owners. Sethe was the only girl in this plantation along with five other male
slaves. All of them lusts after her but she chose Halle because she thought that he is the
most noble out of them for he bought the freedom of his old mother. Sethe and Halle had
two boys, Howard and Bugler, and an unnamed girl. After the death of Mr. Garners, Mrs.
Garners seeks the help of her brother-in-low to run the farm. He is a sadistic, tyrannical,
and racist man who abuses the slaves and treats them inhumanely; therefore, the slaves
plan to escape. At the time of the escape, Sethe was pregnant with her fourth child and
was able to reach safety along with her three other children to Cincinnati, where Baby
Suggs, Sethe’s mother in law, serves as an unofficial preacher to the black community.
Schoolteacher, Mrs. Garner’s brother in law, chases her. When he reaches the town,
Sethe takes her children to the woods and tries to kill them just to avoid a life of slavery
and injustice. Only the unnamed girl was killed by her mother whom she demands to be
engraved on her girl’s tomb the word Beloved. After twenty years, a mysterious young
woman appears on the footsteps of Sethe’s home and revels that her name is Beloved.
Sethe’s relationship with beloved grow more intensely each day “You forgot to smile I
loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me” (p. 108) The quotation shows
hoe the voices of both Beloved and Sethe mingled together as their relationship grew
tighter. Sethe ends up being like a slave for the demands and orders of Beloved in an
attempt to justify her killing to her and to atone her guilt.
 “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free
will and I don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before
because it had to be done quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she
would be.” (p. 100)

After a period of manipulation, Beloved mysteriously and unexpectedly disappears never

to be seen again. The main struggle that Sethe has to endure and suffer is the guilt of the
past. “It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past
life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost.” (p. 29) Beloved is clearly an embodiment
of Sethe’s guilt of killing her own daughter; however, in the beginning, Sethe sees this
action as motivated by motherly love toward her infant daughter, but her conscious
chases her twenty years to make her a slave once more to her own guilt. Sethe has never
been able to achieve reconciliation with herself until the sudden disappearance of
Beloved which symbolizes the freeing of Sethe from the ties of the past. Like most novels
concerned with slavery, the world of the novel presents two types of white characters:
those who might be considered abolitionists and anti-slavery such as the Garners and
Denver, who helped Sethe delvers her fourth baby and was also named Denver, and those
who might be thought of as pro-slavery and racists mainly like Schoolteacher and his
nephew.

Beloved’s main theme is obviously slavery and the emotional, physical, and
psychological traumas it left in the black community during the slavery era. The
consequences of slavery still haunt black people even in freedom. The psychological and
emotional scars of slavery have a crushing impact on slaves; for example, Sethe has
never seen or known her own mother and was forced to kill her own infant daughter. The
loss of identity and self-worth is a major outcome of slavery. At Sweet Home, three of
the male slaves are named Paul D, Paul A, and Paul F as if to symbolize the loss of their
individuality even in their own names. Moreover, one of these slaves, Paul D, starts
hearing screams which he was unable to know wither these sounds and shouts are his or
not. Halle, Sethe’s husband, not only loses his identity but also his own mind when he
witnesses directly the rapping of his own wife by the Schoolteacher’s nephew. As the
world of the novel depicts them, slaves were not considered as humans; they were mere
commodities, an object to be bought and sold at the will of the owner “He would have to
trade this here one for $900 if he could get it, and set out to secure the breeding one, her
foal and the other one, if he found them.” (p. 113) the thing that made slaves accept the
status que and transform themselves to humans without a soul or emotions as it is
observed with Paul D who believes that slaves should not love anything so intensely
because they will eventually lose it; therefore, any feelings he had were locked away in
the rusted “tobacco tin” of his heart. “Saying more might push them both to a place they
couldn’t get back from. He would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin
buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut.” (p. 36) The negative
effects of the institution of slavery extend also to include the whites. Throughout the
novel, the reader observes how slavery makes the white characters illogical, crueler, and
more and more inhuman. Where slavery exists, every one, whether black or white, suffers
a loss of his inhumanity and compassion to his fellow human being. Stamp Paid muses
that slavery’s negative consequences are not limited to the slaves: he notes that slavery
causes whites to become “changed and altered . . . made . . . bloody, silly, worse than
they ever wanted to be.” (p. 99) The gothic theme of the novel cannot be ignored. It is
presented almost on every page of the story. The ghost of the dead unnamed girl
personified in the mysterious character of Beloved can be seen as a main element of the
gothic theme of the novel. Sethe’s slaughtering her own girl is one of the most
frightening scenes in the whole book. Other gothic elements include the merciless
whipping of slaves by Schoolmaster, the rapping of Sethe in front of her own husband,
and many other scenes.

Beloved has a really creative and unique style of narration. Morrison used an
attractive and amusing way of narration to keep the reader entertained. The novel starts in
the present, and after the end of the short first section of the novel, past events are being
narrated in a creative way, from different perspective, and through various characters,
with each one adding new information to the background story. At the end of the novel,
the events take place in the present where we see the final scenes of the novel. The style
of the work mingles the past with the present to give a full scoop of the work. Most of the
novel is narrated through the omniscient narrator; however, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved
also participate in the narration process, providing their points of view, and projecting
their own unique styles of narration. In addition to the creative way of narrating, the
novel is also highly symbolic. The main symbols that dominates the majority of the work
are trees and nature. Nature is represented as the only solace and the safe refuge from the
cruelty of the outside world; moreover, nature serves as a symbol of ultimate freedom
that slaves are fighting to obtain. The beautiful trees of Sweet Home mask the true horror
of the plantation in Sethe’s memory “Sweet Home had more pretty trees than any farm
around.” (p. 10) Paul D finds his freedom by following flowering trees to the North
“That way,” he said, pointing. “Follow the tree flowers,” he said. “Only the tree flowers.
As they go, you go. You will be where you want to be when they are gone.” (p. 56), and
Sethe finds hers by escaping through a forest. As for the language of the work, it might
be considered as direct and straightforward but with some variation depending on the
speaker. For example, Beloved speaks in a somehow vague way, a style which is difficult
to be understood clearly, and full of physical gaps: “some who eat nasty themselves I do
not eat the men without skin bring us their morning water to drink.” (P. 105) Lacking the
context necessary to make links between each discrete image, it is not immediately
evident what Beloved is talking about. Instead, the reader must work harder than usual to
interpret the language.