Beloved Essay

Morrison's Storytelling in Beloved Toni Morrison crafts stories with tremendous skill and art, and her work in Beloved ranks with the best. She rules her readers by forcing them to focus on one person or event then switching at times suddenly and seemingly randomly to another person or event and capturing their curiosity and attention in the process. Morrison jumps right into her story without any formal introduction, immediately making the reader pay attention to names, places, and events. She gives the stories of her characters piece by piece, never completely satisfying the reader until the end when she wraps just about everything up. She also goes into detail of her characters' internal conflicts many times so the reader knows what everyone is thinking. All of her techniques lead to a magnificent story. Morrison captures the reader's attention instantly by jumping into the story on the very first page without any hesitation. The very first line projects intensity that startles the reader: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." She introduces the reader to five characters on the first page as well, Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs, Howard, and Buglar, as well as the setting: a gray and white house at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873. Morrison hints at the fact that a baby's ghost lives in the house on the first page as well, which she confirms two pages later. She announces the characters' fates and how they reached them; Baby Suggs died slowly in bed pining for color in her life and Howard and Buglar ran off due to signs of the ghost. In all of the information that she floods the reader with in the beginning, she leaves much for later. Morrison does not tell why the baby became a ghost. She tells the relationships between the characters, that Baby Suggs is the grandmother and Sethe is the mother of Denver, Howard, and Buglar, but she neglects to mention a father for the children and whether Baby Suggs is Sethe's

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mother or mother-in-law. She also does not tell how the characters arrived in 124 since she tells of a place called Sweet Home from Sethe's memory that is in Kentucky, not Ohio. She also introduces Paul D, a character with no blood relationship to any of the other characters from Sweet Home but as with Sethe she does not tell how he came to Cincinnati, only that it seems to him that he had been walking for eighteen years before arriving. She does not elaborate much on the topic of Sweet Home other than that while thinking about it, Sethe's thoughts compare it to Hell. By blitzing the reader with large amounts of incomplete information, Morrison engages the reader's attention quickly and successfully. Morrison constantly directs and redirects the reader's attention throughout the book. She switches back and forth between one time period and another; sometimes she changes time within the same chapter or even same paragraph. She also devotes entire chapters to specific characters, but then follows them up with chapters unrelated to the previous one. Never does she give a complete account of a character's story all at once or introduce a character one time never to appear again. She always leaves a little part of a character's life unsaid, uncertain, or unknown usually for later explanation but sometimes never cleared up. For example, Morrison brings up that talk of jail brings Paul D back to Alfred, Georgia, on page 42, but she does not explain why until the chapter beginning on page 106. In a more extreme instance, Morrison introduces Sixo on page 21, but she waits to tell the end of his story, which happened before the book's present-time started, until page 228. Her Faulkner-like use of non-linear passage of time in Beloved constantly keeps the reader engaged through the final page.

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Finally, Morrison manipulates her readers' attention by unfolding her characters' thoughts along with the plot. She wrote the book in third person omniscient point-ofview, which naturally allows the reader inside characters' heads to know what they think, but Morrison goes into more detail than most writers in her descriptions. One example is when she writes of a rusty tobacco tin in Paul D's chest instead of a heart that he keeps his memories in and how Beloved makes "flakes of rust" fall off of it. He fought for years to keep it closed, but after having sex with Beloved it opens for all of Morrison's readers to see his struggle of the past and present. She also uses precisely descriptive language when telling of Sethe's internal conflict over killing her daughter, among other conflicts, and emphasizes it by using images like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse when recounting the scene when she actually kills the girl who becomes Beloved. Morrison goes the farthest she can to tell of what goes on inside Sethe, Beloved, and Denver's heads and with their internal conflicts as she devotes four stream-of-consciousness chapters to them. She protractedly features the internal turmoil of her characters to engage further the reader and provide focal points for attention throughout the novel. Morrison directs captures and directs her readers' attentions by including large amounts of bits of information in the opening pages that she does not elaborate on until later, explaining everything in the novel in nonconsecutive segments, and providing deep insights into the characters' internal conflicts. She keeps the book a confusion, similar to the disoriented lives her characters live, and through it maintains a stranglehold on her readers' attentions. Her readers always continue reading, at her mercy as to when and where the questions she makes them ask have answers, if they do at all. Morrison proves herself a master of her craft in Beloved.