“Rememory” and the withholding of Beloved’s cause of death
Beloved is an extremely complicated book, and Toni Morrison’s choice to withhold the information of Beloved’s cause of death from the reader until we are well acquainted with her (similarly to Paul D.) is no accident. Morrison does a good job of making the reader sympathetic towards Sethe’s situation by making them understand the cruelty and trauma of her experiences with slavery as much as they possibly can. The point is not to make them feel that they would have done the same or that what she did was right, but rather to see it from her perspective and understand that in her eyes it was an act of love. Loving and courageous are two traits of Sethe’s that stand out at least after reading the first part of the book. The telling of Denver’s birth story where Sethe was crawling through the woods, trying to get to her children despite her seemingly low chance of survival because she was determined to survive for them, “not to have an easeful death,” (Morrison, 38). Her motivation...