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Toni Morrison's Beloved Analysis

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Toni Morrison divides her audience’s beliefs with her 1987 novel, Beloved, as it introduces a grievous, yet honest story of a mother and her child overcoming their arduous past. Some consider Beloved a novel not meant to be read in a school’s modern day curriculum, while another few believe in the opposite. Despite this, the narrative picks apart and fleshes out the complex characters through their own eyes, instituting a way for the readers to see and feel every individual. Moreover, Beloved portrays in a way that is more unique than most as Morrison not only conveys a brutal reality of slavery, but also its deadly grasp it possesses on those who experienced it personally Laced with emotion heavy tongue and immersing tone, Beloved depicts a heartbreaking tale, one which begins with an anticipated downfall and concludes with a new period of healing. Set after the American Civil War, Beloved is set during the period of Reconstruction, a time where slavery still proves to be a growing concern in the South. Morrison continually fades in back and forth between the characters’ current farmhouse in Ohio and the slavery plantation, ironically called “Sweet Home” that they had escaped eighteen years before the novel opens. The central voice of the novel, Sethe, is someone who had freed herself of Sweet Home physically, but not mentally. Through her experience at the plantation, Sethe is left emotionally scarred from her experience even after its abolishment. In this generation,

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