Beloved Pasts Essay Essay

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Only once one has understood oneself can one begin to truly live. In Morrison s novel, Beloved, she employs a variety of literary techniques to convey her theme that the past is never really dead; rather it lives within everyone it affects. Towards the end of the work, Morrison includes three internal monologues followed by a disjointed entanglement of the three voices. Each reveals crucial and clarifying details about its narrator as well as serves to support Morrison s ultimate theme the past is a part of us. The monologues themselves take the an interior form, a style which sacrifices sequence for profundity, to convey the idea that chronology is negligible when determining the significance of memories.

Sethe narrates the first monologue, hastily justifying her reasons for killing Beloved and fervently expressing her jubilation that she has returned. The account takes the form of interior monologue as Sethe recounts numerous anecdotes from her colorful past. She first expresses her permanent emotional scars from having her milk stolen by the men with no skin or white men with numerous (and anachronistic) references to nursing and milk. This abstraction is later revisited in Denver s monologue. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else and the one time I did it was took from me they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby (200). Sethe continues in desperation as she tries to blame Paul D for preventing her from recognizing Beloved as soon as she arrived at 124 and then trails off into a painful description of Sweet Home and her experiences under Schoolteacher. She regretfully remembers the stories like that of her brutal beating when they opened her back while she was pregnant with Denver to convey to Beloved how necessary it was for her to save her from the horrors of slavery. She maintains that her motives were driven by love, that she intended to kill all four children and herself. When that was unsuccessful, she says, I put that headstone up I wanted to lay in there with you, put your head on my shoulder and keep you warn, and I would have in Buglar and Howard didn t need me, because my mind was homeless then (204). Throughout the monologue, Sethe s identity manifests itself in her description of Beloved, and she implies that much of her desire to make Beloved understand derives from her own desire to understand why she grew up motherless. That concept also clarifies Sethe s desperate attempts to salvage what little familial love she can scrape together. In addition, the construction of Sethe s monologue, more abstractly, communicates Morrison s ultimate theme that the past, despite its chronology, is as alive as the memories that preserve it. Though the style is dense, Sethe s feelings towards Beloved come from a compilation of myriad disturbing experiences that could never be reported in any other format.

Denver s monologue addresses slavery from a second-generation point of view. She herself never lived under slavery, but she has suffered no less from its repercussions. Her main distress comes from her desire for a complete family, one of which slavery as an institution deprived her. Such separating of families was a crucial facet of keeping slavery alive, since weakening the individual in all aspects was necessary to maintain their inferiority. Thus, though Denver never took the actual identity of slave, she must live fatherless, sisterless, and ultimately motherless as a result of the deterioration of her family. Much of her monologue consists of stories about her waiting for her father, Halle, and of her unlikely companionship with Beloved, both ghost and human. She actively seeks out Beloved s love because she is so desperate for family while simultaneously she resents her because of her interference into her relationship with her mother. Denver s monologue also reveals a crucial difference in she and her mother s revisitation of their pasts. While Sethe s memories resurface in the form of live rememories, Denver s refusal to confront her circumstances maturely results in her inability to grow up, despite her age. Her monologue, therefore, takes the form of a child s story, disjointed and without direction. She skips from tale to tale about her father, about herself, and about Beloved. She brags about her father like a schoolgirl, My daddy was an angel man. He could look at you and tell where you hurt and he could fix it too We should all be together. Me, him and Beloved. Ma am could stay or go off with Paul D if she wanted to (209). These thoughts show a great deal about Denver s mistrust of her mother and exaltation of her father, however undeserved. She has so shielded herself that Sethe no longer fits into her familial fantasy. After Beloved destroys Sethe Denver is finally able to see that she can manage living without the picture perfect family, but primarily, she craves Beloved s attention and love. And I do. Love her. I do. She played with me and always came to be with me whenever I needed her. She s mine, Beloved. She s mine (209).

Beloved s monologue is the most poetic of the four. Its total lack of punctuation or any grammatical structure...

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