Sunday, July 11, 2010
Beloved
Beloved was a powerful book with a mesage that we can all learn from. The things that some people have gone throungh and the choices that they have made follow them forever. Sometimes we think that we are doing things for the right reason only to have it come back to haunt us latter in life. When Sethe choose to kill her baby rather that have it grow up as a slave she thought she was doing the right thing only to have it come back to haunt her for the reast of her life. Being chased by a ghost as to say would be a parents worst nighmare. Beloved was a very diffcult book to read. The unsuspecting flash backs took me by suprise most of the book. Even when I came to expect them I would still have to go back and reread many parts to try to understand what was happining in the story. I personally think that Toni Morrison did some of this on purpose. With all of the going back and rereading it gave me a better unserstanding of what was happining in the story. Its like when you go back and watch a movie the secound or third time you see things that you didnt see the first time. Books can be like that also. After reading other parts of the book and then rereading something from earlyer it gave me a better understanding of just what was going on.
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I believe that Sethe thought she was making the right choice also, when she killed beloved. As hindsight is always twenty-twenty she will always question that decision. Did it ruin everything good in her life? All the good parts of her, her children ran away and feared her after that. She could have still believed that she would have saved them all from something worse. If she had known that the civil war was going to end slavery would she have still killed beloved? They would have been free from school teacher in probably just a few years, which may have been tolerable to her. I liked the flash backs flowing into the story. I would be surprised by some of them. I would suddenly realize that I am reading about the past. It was like a painting that showed everything at once and the past was on the same canvas.
ReplyDeleteI completely agree with you, Brandon. I think that Morrison intentionally surprised the reader with flashbacks in order to confuse us a bit, and force us to re-read the story time and time again. I read this novel about 3 years ago and I recall reading is multiple times because I was writing my senior thesis on it. When I dug the book up again this summer, I discovered that the book had hundreds on notes written by myself all over it, due to my obvious confusion and questioning certain passages. I think this novel was meant to be read multiple times in order to uncover more and more meaning and different themes.
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