Illuminating the Minds

Life happens in first-person. People struggle to ascertain each other’s thoughts and desires because of our natural opacity. However, as we develop relationships, we discover the personality of others. In literature, authors attempt to create similar connections and links between readers and characters through their points of view and narrative techniques. This empathy and emotional connection assists the author in conveying the novel’s central meaning. A first-person point of view allows the reader to create a connection to the narrator, but a third-person omniscient establishes connections with each of the characters. This connection deepens as the author exposes the characters’ backgrounds. In Beloved, Toni Morrison narrates the story primarily from a third-person omniscient point of view. However, since the narration begins in medias res, or in the middle of the story, Morrison writes with frequent flashbacks so readers can relate more deeply with the main characters. She also shifts into stream of consciousness narration for a small section, allowing further exploration of the minds of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved. Morrison’s variety of narrative techniques illuminates the minds of the characters in the novel, slowly exposes their turbid, pain-filled past, and explores their struggle to find their identity.

Morrison writes Beloved in medias res, so she must give sufficient background information about the characters in order to explain their current actions. However, in Beloved, so much of the present action relies on the consequences of past experiences that mere summary would not be sufficient. Because the novel relies heavily on past events at Sweet Home or in the early years in Ohio, Morrison breaks the typical linear time...

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...free, content to possess each other, while their isolated life in 124 caves in around them. This illustrated closeness, as well as the intense illumination into the minds of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, establishes and solidifies their characters through the remainder of the novel.

Throughout Beloved, Morrison’s varied narrative techniques open the reader’s eyes to the complicated personalities and characteristics of the black community, providing insight to their internal emotional strugglers. Through this, she adds an unspoken emotional aspect to the already intense reader experience, drawing them into the novel. As the characters become more complicated, Morrison complicates the novel, overwhelming the reader with a barrage of conflicts and struggles to convey the struggle of slaves to find and solidify their existence, identity, and future.

Works Cited

Beloved