Beloved, The Final Installment

Hi all! Unfortunately, this will be my last blog post for Beloved! To preface all of this, I’ve had a phenomenal time reading the book, and Toni Morrison still doesn’t cease to amaze me.

After spending some time thinking about what I had just read as well as discussing it with classmates, I presented myself with a question about Beloved.  As I read this book as part of a free choice project for my AP English class, I decided to ask myself: is Beloved a book that should be read by AP , or is on par with other books read by AP classes?  Well, to answer that question on a simple level, yes.  But why?  To start, Beloved is a very difficult book to comprehend, which in the end enhances proper reading skills.  One major goal of an AP Literature course is to enhance a student’s ability to comprehend complex literature.  Beloved is a perfect book to work on this task.  Heck, I didn’t understand who Beloved actually was until I was three quarters of the way through the novel.  I’m still very unclear on all of the motifs, but started to get an inkling as to what each one represented towards the end of the novel.  This doesn’t show that I improved, but practicing the reading of complex literature in the end enhances the ability to comprehend it in the first place.  Yes, Beloved is one of the most difficult novels I have ever read.  Students should not read Beloved at the beginning of the year because of the complexity of the literature.  I can note an improvement in my ability to comprehend complex literature since the beginning of the year, especially following the completion of Song of Solomon, another Toni Morrison novel.  Beloved was the next challenge, and although I’ve described the text as one that is quite difficult to understand, that doesn’t remove the book from being AP worthy.  If anything, the book is intellectually too advanced for high school students (not intending to sound condescending here, as I had a great deal of difficult with the content), and requires maybe a few more years of practice before the book can be appreciated for the true value.  However, if a student has the capacity to understand the motifs and how they relate to the complex theme of escaping the literal sense of slavery, but never the social construct, the student clearly has understood the novel and has the capacity to write about Beloved on an AP Exam essay. Yes, Beloved is AP worthy!

Thank you one last time!

Dom

Beloved: The Final Quarter

Hello again! I’ve just finished reading the final quarter of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Just to bring everyone into the picture, we recently found out that Beloved is in fact the daughter of Sethe.  Sethe killed her child (Beloved) upon the arrival of four white males at the 124 residence. Stamp Paid remembered this whole scenario and decided that he might as well enlighten Paul D on how reckless and seemingly murderous Sethe is.  Paul D stormed out of the house after Stamp Paid showed him a newspaper clipping regarding the murder of Beloved, and now Sethe, Beloved, and Denver are alone at 124.  So let’s get up to speed on the most recent section of the book.  First of all, we find out that Sethe isn’t the only one who has killed someone.  Stamp Paid talks about how he changed his name after he murdered his own wife, whose name was Vashti.  Stamp Paid’s name used to be Joshua.  Paul D also lets Stamp Paid in on the fact that he was present for the murder of Beloved and didn’t really do anything about it.  During all of this, Beloved takes complete control of the household. This happens because Sethe finally realizes who Beloved is and wants to reciprocate feelings of love.  Beloved becomes so demanding that Sethe more or less is dying because of Beloved’s demands (oh and meanwhile, all of these people are going hungry, so Denver is out looking for some job to feed three people with, as apparently Sethe is so preoccupied with Beloved that she can no longer work).  So in the end, a whole bunch of women from the town approach the 124 residence after being informed on the situation from Denver, and Beloved, after a run in because of the presence of another “dangerous” white man, leaves the house.  Sethe is completely destroyed by the abandonment of Beloved.  Finally, Paul D returns to Sethe (who seems to be on her deathbed), and starts to return her into the state she was in towards the beginning of the novel.  

So all of that as plot summary, but now let’s talk about some of the more interesting stuff.  Morrison wrote a particular chapter in this story without any sort of punctuation.  The chapter followed two previous chapters of similar structure, in the sense that Morrison included similar sentiments from the characters she was describing.  The first two chapters in this series of three discuss how Sethe and Denver deal with the fact that Beloved is a family member.  Upon reaching the third chapter, Beloved attempts to give her insight on how she feels to be back in the family, but this is done entirely without punctuation.  Imagine reading five or six pages of a book where instead of periods, there are six spaces (fun).  The lack of punctuation could have to deal with the uneducated personality of Beloved, or just because she is a ghost, but I am yet to decide which one.  I just thought the stylistic component of that particular section was noteworthy.  I guess I’ll take one more shot at theme, as I’ve finished the book now.  I think I was on the right track with the whole slavery ordeal, and just how hard it was to leave a slave life behind and move into a new world.  As the book progressed, I found out more and more terrible things that each character had done or seen after leaving the realm of a slave plantation.  Morrison, with Sethe, shows that African Americans feel so disenfranchised by white people that they are driven to perform terrible acts of violence (such as the original killing of Beloved).  For other members of the class who have also completed this book, what are your thoughts on the theme?

Thanks for tuning in again,

Dom