Pecola is the main character of the story, even though she is not the narrator, because she is the one most affected by race, hatred, and her own idea of ugliness. Near the start of the book, Morrison writes about the Breedlove's "home," a bleak storefront, "They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly" (Morrison 28)
One critic believes that Pauline's skewed views of beauty contribute to Cholly's anger and their own unhappiness. She writes, "The same racism that underpins the standards of beauty under which Pecola and her mother, Pauline, suffer, is also at the root of Pecola's father's alcoholism and violence" (Stanford)
She stated that not only do whites repress the memory but so do blacks. Morrison, however, believes that it is important for both races to recognize that the crime of slavery was committed (Angelo) because it affected both races
The black community in Cincinnati never forgave Sethe but she learned to live with her decision once she was able to rid Beloved's spirit from her life. In writing Beloved, Morrison uses a writing style reminiscent of James Joyce in that she uses free association to jump from one story line to another while going forward with the main story line (Feng-hui)
Few, for example, will be capable of understanding how Sethe's killing her daughter, Beloved, was an act of love but it is a perfect demonstration by Morrison of how demonstrations of love are unique to each individual (Koolish). The essential value of Morrison's book was the fact that it stirred debate about slavery and its effects among a generation of Americans that had largely ignored the issue (Kimberly)
Unfortunately, readers will not always agree with the characters' demonstration of their love. Few, for example, will be capable of understanding how Sethe's killing her daughter, Beloved, was an act of love but it is a perfect demonstration by Morrison of how demonstrations of love are unique to each individual (Koolish)
Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved (Morrison), based loosely on a real life experience of a Cincinnati area former slave, mirrors her own journey from her early life living in a segregated South to her moving to a more racially friendly Lorain, Ohio (Reinhardt)
At various times throughout the novel, Sethe is forced to address her decision. In the end the reader is left with the impression that it was likely the right thing to do but that Sethe did not possess the moral right to do it (Rothstein)
He had laughed. His cheap little *****-wife had tried to kill her - sort of - and might succeed one day would he laugh then too would he look finally at the charred flesh of his own flesh and settle that also as though it were a guest's bounced check or a no-show musician or a quarrel with a salesman who had shortchanged an order of Scotch whiskey? (Morrison 135)
Siddhartha is happy and at peace by the end of the novel because he has learned how to feel, how to think, and how to see the good in the world. He tells Govinda, learned through his body and soul that it was necessary for me to sin, that I needed lust, that I had to strive for property and experience nausea and the depths of despair in order to learn not to resist them, in order to learn to love the world, and no longer compare it with some kind of desired imaginary world, some imaginary vision of perfection, but to leave it as it is, to love it and be glad to belong to it" (Hesse 146)
Milkman's ultimate task is to achieve "a strong and centered sense of self, a self that accepts responsibility for his past and reaches out in love for others." As Morrison told Mel Watkins, "If there is any consistent theme in my fiction, I guess that is it - how and why we learn to live this life intensely and well" (Morrison and Bloom 6)
The opening line of the novel is evoked once again through Sethe's conflicted grief, as she herself is haunted and filled with the venom of her baby's demise. When she quietly declares that "if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her" (Morrison, 1987, pp
By touching on the plight of infancy, the helplessness and frustration of those unable to fully fend for themselves, Morrison alludes to both the fates of characters to come and the overarching societal circumstances imposed on slaves in spite of their supposed freedman status. Again and again throughout the text of Beloved, Morrison returns to the subject of infantilization and indeed, "a wounded, enraged baby is the central figure of the book, both literally, in the character of Beloved, and symbolically, as it struggles beneath the surface of other major characters" (Schapiro, 1991, pp
Author Brooks Bouson argues that among the images and themes of Morrison's most noteworthy book, Beloved, the author wants readers to understand how slave women -- in a very real way -- were turned into reproduction machines. Black women were objectified as the "Other" due to the fact that they could produce children "…as easily as animals" (Bouson, 2000, p
In other words, by creating stories that bring the previous values and traditions of black folks to life, she is helping to preserve history while at the same time entertaining and educating readers. Author Stelamaris Coser continues along the same lines as Mobley vis-a-vis Morrison's ability to transcend so-called "black" or "feminist" literature and instead "…recapture and reorganize the fragments of collective history into a new type of narrative (Coser, 19934, p
Racial Author Sam Durrant approaches Morrison's novels by looking at the difference between the author's use of cultural memory and racial memory. The works of Morrison function very well in terms of her narrative vis-a-vis the African-American experience, Durrant writes; but there is another level much deeper in her books and cultural memories are kept apart from racial memories for good reason, Durrant explains (Durrant, 2004, p
Basically Hall is saying that Morrison is using an unusual approach to beauty by presenting communication not so much through verbalizing but through descriptions of the black female body. In Beloved Morrison uses her narrative to denote "sound, smell, movement and touch" and hence Morrison is able to fully present the bodies of Sethe, of Baby Suggs and Nan as the "scarred" and "enslaved" and "displaced" bodies that they are (Hall, 74)
Could these kinds of hideously unjust things have happened with regularity in the world of American slavery -- men fornicating with cows one day and raping African slaves the next day? Morrison wants readers to imagine just how horrifying this kind of life was for millions of woman back in the days of legal slavery. Toni Morrison's meaning in Jazz The music depicted in Morrison's narrative in Jazz represents the "…original African-American response" to the great human need for good communication between people (Harding, et al
To wit, the scars on Sethe's back of course reflect what slavery did to millions of black people; but those scars are also linked to Morrison's The Black Book because in The Black Book there is a portrait of an escaped slave whose back is "…furrowed and scarred with the traces of a whipping administered on Christmas-day last" (Morrison, 9) (Hall, 76). Why did Morrison use the image of a murdered child who comes back to live with its mother 18 years after it (Beloved) had been killed? Author Therese Higgins believes that Morrison brought a ghost into this Pulitzer Prize-winning novel because there is an African belief that "ancestral spirits" do return to their living relatives' homes (Higgins, 2001, p
Toni Morrison -- the meanings in Beloved "…Consider Beloved as a montage of differing realities, of the multiple identities within the text…a cultural manifestation of multiple constituencies that disrupt or overturn dominant cultural views of blacks as absent or negated… [And] the retelling of the story, in pieces, by different narrators…confronts the dominant culture…moving the marginalized other from eroticized object to a subject…threatening the dominant culture's subject position" (Schreiber, 2001, p. 121-22) Writing in the peer-reviewed journal Language in India, critic Mahboobeh Khaleghi asserts that while Morrison shows "…what slavery did to black people bodies and minds," she also presents the notion that by confronting, "reclaiming and transforming history" the African-American culture can heal through the "potential of memory" (Khaleghi, 2012, p