When we consider that Freud suggests in Chapter I that the feeling of "oceanic" connectedness with some larger reality -- a feeling which characterizes religious experience, and which Freud confesses he himself has never experienced personally -- is in fact due to the "derivation of religious needs from the infant's helplessness and the longing for the father aroused by it" which, says Freud, "seems to me incontrovertible." Freud then notes "I cannot think of any need in childhood as strong as the need for a father's protection" (Freud 19)
Though written at three completely different times in American history, the three works of fiction illustrate that sacrifice and a lack of self-identity are issues that can plague different races and different sexes for many different reasons. Arthur Miller once wrote, referring to his fictional character Willy Loman, "the tragic feeling is invoked whenever we are in the presence of a character, any character, who is ready to sacrifice his life, if need be, to secure one thing, his personal dignity" (Baym 2403)
Death of a Salesman, Beloved, and "Antebellum Sermon" are all works that deal with sacrifice, oppression and a loss of identity, though "Antebellum Sermon" is -- arguably -- a much more hopeful perspective on all three themes. Dunbar's preacherly poem worked to "master and manipulate the expectations of their various audiences" and give black people "a model of what it means to be free" (Blount 590-1)
I never have to wait in line to see a buyer. 'Willy Loman is here!' That's all they have to know, and I go right through (Miller 33)
This is illustrated when the schoolteacher lists the slaves "animal characteristics," calling them "creatures" that need to be "handled" just as livestock would need to be "handled." In many ways, the schoolteacher makes the slaves seem even less than animals because "unlike a snake or a bear, a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin" (Morrison 172)