Has anyone ever deliberately left you? Left you alone, feeling deserted, isolated, and by yourself? Imagine you were abandoned by those who were supposed to love you from the day you were born until this present day. How would that make you feel? In Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, she examines the causes, effects, and consequences of abandonment through one character, Cholly Breedlove. As well as the ways he eventually destroys himself and also those around him.
Even before his birth, Cholly Breedlove has felt the vicious sting of loneliness. Cholly Breedlove was born to a young mother who, after four days of life, discarded him in "the rim of a tire under a soft black Georgia sky" (133). His father decided to leave his mother even before Cholly was born. Fortunately, he was rescued by his Great Aunt Jimmy, who raised him thereafter. He grew an intense love for his Aunt Jimmy, but her death marked the first of many episodes that began a downward spiral of his adolescent life.
At Aunt Jimmy’s funeral, Cholly is placed into a traumatic world of racism when two white hunters interrupt him having clumsy sexual intercourse with a young girl, Darlene. He immediately transfers his angry energy to Darlene because he realizes that hating two white men would not be the smartest thing to do in a segregated racist world. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him…--that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of as and a question mark of smoke” (119). The white men are out of his reach, and Cholly grows to hate and kill white men. His masculinity was revoked when those two men forced him to continue having sex while they hilariously watched.
Cholly abandoned Darlene when he found out she might be pregnant; most likely because he was abandoned by his father as a child. "He had to get away. Never mind the fact that he was leaving that very day…Cholly knew it was wrong to run out on a pregnant girl, and recalled, with sympathy, that his father had done just that to him. Now he understood. He knew then what he must do--find his father. His father would understand" (120).
After being “abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose” with Cholly Breedlove.
In Viktor Frankl’s essay “Man’s Search For Meaning,” he recounts his experiences surviving the holocaust. Frankl shows how traumatic experiences shape people and force them to change in accordance with what is happening to them. Furthermore, he argues that adaptation was the only way he could survive. To prove this, he describes how he learned to shut himself off from certain aspects of his life and pay more attention to aspects of life that gave him hope, such as nature. Similarly, adaptation is also an important concern of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. In Beloved, Morrison explores Frankl’s idea about how people adapt differently to trauma, some love more than they previously had because they are finally free to do so, some try to find a shaky balance between independence and love and others rely too heavily on the love of a few.
Toni Morrison’s book “Beloved” is a true story based on a woman in the slave life. This book demonstrates the destructive potential of a mother's love and the impossibility of the former slaves ever forgetting their experiences in segregation.
Abandoned almost at birth, Cholly is rescued by his beloved Aunt Jimmy, who later dies when he is sixteen. After her burial, Cholly is humiliated by two white hunters who
A typical family in the 1940’s consisted of a caring, nurturing mother whose sole purpose was to raise her child with unconditional affection, and a strict but tough-loving father who would always be there for his child no matter what the circumstance. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Cholly Breedlove never experienced this form of authentic love. Growing up with absent parents, Cholly was forced to be independent from birth. This independence gave way to his brand of freedom -- meaning that he was able to live without boundaries, and that he was exempt or released from onerous burdens, or more importantly, his abusive parents. Freedom was his scapegoat; an excuse to become an evil and despicable monster who terrorized
The “bads” certainly outweigh the “goods” in his situation. Thus, the reader ought not to feel sympathy for Cholly. But, Morrison presents information about Cholly in such a way that it mandates sympathy from her reader. This depiction of Cholly as a man of freedom and the victim of awful happenings is wrong because it evokes sympathy for a man who does not deserve it.
In Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer prize-winning novel Beloved, the past lingers on. The novel reveals to readers the terrors of slavery and how even after slavery had ended, its legacy drove people to commit horrific actions. This truth demonstrates how the past stays with us, especially in the case of Sethe and Paul D. The story focuses on previous slaves Paul D and Sethe, as well as Sethe’s daughters Denver and Beloved, who are all troubled by the past. Although both Paul D and Sethe are now free they are chained to the unwanted memories of Sweet Home and those that precede their departure from it. The memories of the horrific past manifest themselves physically as Beloved, causing greater pains that are hard to leave behind and affect the present. In the scene soon after Beloved arrives at 124 Bluestone, Sethe's conversation with Paul D typifies Morrison’s theme of how the past is really the present as well. Morrison is able to show this theme of past and present as one through her metaphors and use of omniscient narration.
Being unwanted, unloved, and forgotten is one of the hardest things that one may have to cope with. In the book “Theories of Relativity” by Barbara-Attard Haworth, the poem “Behind her Tears” by Jessica Sanches, and the short story “The Ugly Duckling” by Hans Christian Andersen, all share a similar theme which is feeling unaccepted in one’s family, or community. The feeling of being unwanted crosses each and every mind at least once, and it impacts that someone’s life. They also try their hardest just to fit in, and they will always find a way through.
Cholly Breedlove, the husband of Pauline and the father of Pecola, is an abusive older man who ends up running away after raping his own daughter. While Cholly is reminiscing on his past, he comes to recall that he “...could go to jail and not feel imprisoned, for he had already seen the furtiveness in the eyes of his jailer, free to say, “No suh,” and smile, for he had already killed three white men. Free to take a woman’s insults, for his body had already conquered hers” (Morrison 159). Toni Morrison wrote Cholly as a terrible person, beating his family and raping his daughter, but gave us this backstory that told of all the pain he had felt in his life, where he felt alone and betrayed. But, where many could rise to become better people and seek help from others, it is almost as if Cholly mentally changes, believing himself to be powerful in every way, killing people and smiling after it, believing to own a woman, and just being able to do whatever he wants. Even if Cholly has this sad background, many have come from this state to be a humanitarian person, whereas he has committed acts considered unspeakable and horrible to a modern day person. Toni Morrison's gender as a woman has influenced how she has written the men in her story, each as horrible people, but acting as if a sad backstory will pardon them in the
Self-hatred is something that can thoroughly destroy an individual. As it was fictitiously evidenced in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, it can lead an individual to insanity. Toni Morrison raises the idea that racism and class can detrimentally influence people’s outlook on themselves.
Toni Morrison’s powerful novel Beloved is based on the aftermath of slavery and the horrific burden of slavery’s hidden sins. Morrison chooses to depict the characters that were brutalized in the life of slavery as strong-willed and capable of overcoming such trauma. This is made possible through the healing of many significant characters, especially Sethe. Sethe is relieved of her painful agony of escaping Sweet Home as well as dealing with pregnancy with the help of young Amy Denver and Baby Suggs. Paul D’s contributions to the symbolic healing take place in the attempt to help her erase the past. Denver plays the most significant role in Sethe’s healing in that she brings the community’s support to her mother and claims her own individuality in the process. Putting her trust in other people is the only way Sethe is able to relieve herself of her haunted past and suffering body. Morrison demonstrates that to overcome the scars of slavery, one must place themselves in the hands of those that love them, rather than face the painful memories alone.
Loneliness is usually a common and unharmful feeling, however, when a child is isolated his whole life, loneliness can have a much more morbid effect. This theme, prevalent throughout Ron Rash’s short story, The Ascent, is demonstrated through Jared, a young boy who is neglected by his parents. In the story, Jared escapes his miserable home life to a plane wreck he discovers while roaming the wilderness. Through the use of detached imagery and the emotional characterization of Jared as self-isolating, Rash argues that escaping too far from reality can be very harmful to the stability of one’s emotional being.
Perhaps one of the most important issues in Toni Morrison's award-winning novel Beloved is Morrison's intentional diversity of possible interpretations. However the text is looked at and analyzed, it is the variety of these multiple meanings that confounds any simple interpretation and gives the novel the complexity. The debate rages on over many topics, but one issue of central and basic importance to the understanding of the novel is defining the different possibilities for interpreting the title character. As Robert Broad recognizes, "the question, "Who the hell is Beloved?" must haunt the reader of the novel," and the reader must come to some basic understanding of her character to appreciate the difficult stream of consciousness sections (Broad 189). But there may be no "basic" understanding available of Beloved, for she is a character that ostensibly refuses any single identity, either literal or symbolic.
In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, Morrison uses universal themes and characters that anyone can relate to today. Set in the 1800s, Beloved is about the destructive effects of American slavery. Most destructive in the novel, however, is the impact of slavery on the human soul. Morrison’s Beloved highlights how slavery contributes to the destruction of one’s identity by examining the importance of community solidarity, as well as the powers and limits of language during the 1860s.
With The Bluest Eye, Morrison has not only created a story, but also a series of painfully accurate impressions. As Dee puts it "to read the book...is to ache for remedy" (20). But Morrison raises painful issues while at the same time managing to reveal the hope and encouragement beneath the surface.
In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison eloquently depicts the horrors of slavery, while simultaneously delving into the extremities of maternal love. The story revolves around the lives of an escaped slave, Sethe, and her daughter, Denver. However, their home is haunted by the revenant of Sethe’s first daughter, Beloved, whom Sethe killed twenty-eight days after she arrived at her mother in law’s house after escaping from a plantation. Through her use of symbols, her choice of setting, and her manipulation of characters, Morrison demonstrates how slavery affected parent-child relations and redefined the term of maternal love.