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Summary: Beloved Review
Review: I can hardly imagine the brutality and savage ways slaves were forced to live under. The powerful story of a woman named Sethe, her loved ones, and the community definitely raises a few eyebrows with its daring contents and horrific scenes of brutality mixed with absolute love. Unafraid of controversy, Toni Morrison sets no limits on what a person may do in the name of love. Love is dangerous in the house of 124 yet love is their only hope for a 'family" in the end.
The beginning of the novel was unmistakably disturbing. It is possible; Morrison purposely made the story confusing in order to force the reader to take numerous pieces of a puzzle and assemble it to create something beautiful. When I was in the process of reading Beloved, I could not help but question whether Toni was angry, racist, or cynical. It is astonishing how a writer can take a well-known, well defined, subject and create a turbulent flow of question after question of the graphic treatment slaves encountered and how it influenced each character's behavior and personality disorders. The mind behind such a daring masterpiece seems bold and again brings up questions of whether something may be wrong with her. Beloved is not a novel easily understood. You are forced to use clues in her writing to realize the total effect of the plot. Sethe's attempted murders of her children and actual murder of her daughter, exhibits the severe life of a slave which a mother could not bare, her children endure. Morrison writes scenes pertaining to current issues such as euthanasia and infanticide. I could not help but examine whether Sethe's actions were understandable or psychotic.
The novel Beloved can be viewed upon in many different ways and aspects. It is controversial and leaves the reader thinking and creating his or her own idea of what will happen where Morrison leaves off. You question if Sethe, Paul D, and Denver will finally grow into a family and be accepted by the community.
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Summary: beloved review
Review: Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is a powerful piece of work. The novel shows how hard a slave's life really was. The slaves suffered through so many hardships, such as losing family members, getting beaten-up, and for the females- being raped. Most of the whites treated slaves as if they weren't human at all, but rather a piece of property, which they could do what they pleased with. Luckily for Sethe and the "Sweet Home men", their kind slave-owner, Mr. Garner treated them with respect, though it angered other slave-owning whites. Sethe and the "Sweet Home men" did not realize how fortunate they were till Mr. Garner was gone. Their new slave-owner's cruelty caused Sethe and the "Sweet Home men" to run away and pursue freedom. For many blacks that were slaves on a plantation in the south in the early 19th century, freedom was only a dream. A dream, which was wanted by all, but owned by few.
The novel has many twists and turns to it. The reader can never be quite sure what will happen next. When one of the "Sweet Home men", Paul D, arrives at Sethe's house he overpowers the baby ghost who has been haunting the house for the past 18 years. That would seem to be the end of the baby ghost, but the next day the baby ghost shows up in flesh and blood, calling herself- Beloved. At first nobody realizes Beloved is the baby ghost as well as the crawling already baby. Denver is the first to discover Beloved's secret. It takes Sethe, Beloved's own mother, a few months to come upon the true identity of Beloved. By then Paul D has found out what Sethe did to her crawling-already baby and left. Once Sethe figures out who Beloved is, she is overjoyed because she can now spend time with both of her daughters. Each of the three girls- Sethe, Denver, and Beloved, enjoy happy fun filled times. They go ice-skating, stay up late talking, and Sethe cooks and eats with them. However the fun doesn't last. Sethe loses her job and they start to run out of food in the house. This food shortage combined with Sethe's failing health convinced Denver to go out into the real world to find help. Denver finds a job and brings food home, and then the neighbors come to help her get rid of the disease-causing Beloved. With Beloved gone, Paul D returns. Sethe, Denver, and Paul D become a family who have made it through the hard times, and now have a bright future in front of them.
Toni Morrison wanted her opinion on slaves to be heard, and it is heard clearly. The style she uses to express her opinion through her novel Beloved is loud and strong. She didn't like how white men treated blacks and especially black women back in the 19th century. She believes like I do, slavery was a very wrongdoing by the whites that lived in the United States. The slaves were treated worse than animals and had no rights at all. Therefore it is very gracious of Morrison to dedicate her book to the 60 million or more slaves who died on the slave ships on their way over to America.
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Summary: Beloved Book Review
Review: Toni Morrison's Beloved ia a captivating yet confusing book. She takes you through a maze of questions and leaves you to ponder and predict their answers. She is an incredible writer with many different talents. She chooses every word for a significant reason. Her style is astounding and is probably on of the best I have ever seen. Beloved is a very interesting story and forces the reader to reread pages in order to gain a full understanding of the book. Morrison has worked very hard in producing a well-written novel.
Beloved opens the story with the sentence,"124 was spiteful." 124 is the house where Sethe and her daughter, Denver, live. A baby ghost, Sethe's daughter who she killed, is haunting house 124. Sethe, being a former slave wants nothing more then the best for her children. In a flashback, we discover the many secrets that Sethe does not want to face and the hardships she has overcome. She looks to a friend and lover named Paul D for comfort and advice. Paul D serves as her confidant. He is described as the type of guy women could cry to. In the difficult days of slavery, Sethe sees the danger that her children are in if they grow up. She wants to subdue their sufferings by taking their lives. She is successful in taking the life of one of her daughters. Beloved, a reincarnation of her dead daughter, comes to live with Sethe and allows her to deal with her past.
One of the major themes in this story is memory. Sethe's memories are things that haunt her and will continue to haunt her until she decides to deal with her past.
Beloved causes many problems within their family but she also is the most important person in the book because she causes each character to change.
Morrison's writing is described in chunks and pieces where the reader has to search for understanding. She leaves you with many unanswered questions like, whether or not Beloved was a real person. This is the most interesting question in the book, yet I still have no answer. This is why Beloved is such a great book to read. It makes you think and allows you to acknowledge her incredible style of writing.
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Summary: The Power of Love
Review: Beloved Book Review Detailed flashbacks of the lives of Sethe and the other slaves on Sweet Home (a plantation in Kentucky) gives the reader a glimpse into the inhuman practice of slavery. Some of these detestable accounts include Paul D being forced to perform oral sex on white jail guards, and a pregnant Sethe being raped and nursed by her owner and being beaten so unmercifully that the cuts on her back resembled a Chokecherry Tree.
This tree could also represent the family that Sethe longed to keep safe from slavery. Sethe wanted to be the base of this tree, providing her children with the protection they needed and a foundation on which to start a new life of freedom. She tried to keep her own children from slavery by killing them because she believed that what was in the next life was better then a life of slavery.
After successfully killing her "crawling already" daughter, her two sons Howard and Buglar run away. Sethe struggles to keep her own life together while raising the only child she had left, Denver. Denver had only left the house a few times, two of which were with her mother. She was a lonely child who's whole world was in the house on Bluestone road. When the baby that Sethe killed came back in the human form of Beloved, Denver found the companionship that she had longed for all of those years. Denver later becomes the quiet heroin of the story, venturing out into the world to help her mother, and finding herself now able to be a part of the world outside her home.
Beloved was a captivating story that made you work hard to piece together the parts of of the story. This story showed the intensity of the human spirit and what one person would do in the name of love.
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Summary: Joanna's Beloved Review
Review: Toni Morrison's Beloved, with its forcefulness of the descriptions of actions and events, takes the novel into a deeper understanding of a world in which our lives are not our own. Beloved portrays a former slave through the struggles of life during slavery and post-slavery. Sethe, who manages to avoid the cruelty of slave life, lives it with the memories of the past. With the novel told in bits and pieces of memories, disoriented, and confused thought of Sethe. No longer bound under the cruel, overpowering "Schoolteacher" from the "Sweet Home" plantation, Sethe however is still a slave to the images of the past.
The existence of slavery creates a disturbed and disputable moral issue of the novel. The questionable action of Sethe murdering her daughter Beloved as to protect her from the outside world of slavery sets the idea of how cruelly they were mistreated that would lead to killing their own child. This makes us think, "How much can a person love another to have them kill?" Sethe may be portrayed as a mother who loved too much or a slave that has just gone crazy. Either way, Sethe has kept her children away from slavery, but she, on the other hand, is still coping with it.
Like a flood, Sethe's emotions and images of the agonizing, unforgettable past comes all at once, rushing to her, in which she has no control over. With that, the intensity of all the tortured events they faced are surfaced to the top, which forced her to relive them. The presence of Paul D, who has a rusted metal box for a heart, and Beloved allows Sethe to open up and tolerate through the memories.
With the issue of slavery, the theme of anger is dominant throughout the entire novel. With the many losses of lives in the novel, it's no wonder why the characters face many angry emotions. Anger may be seen in the author in how she portrays the white characters and black characters. Morrison places the whites on a pedestal and is delineated with calling them "white trash" and "freaks". Their actions towards the slaves are inhumane. It depicts what little or no respect they showed towards the slaves by beating them and treating them like a "piece of property".
Even with the end of slavery, they were still treated cruelly with having to be served last. Although Morrison does characterize whites as being ruthless, she also shows hostility towards the black community by having them be angry and jealous of Sethe because of what they have. The scars on Sethe's back in which she received from the slave owners are shown on a cherry choke tree. The lines of the tree symbolize the struggles of slavery and the scars that are created.
Morrison's Beloved creates a powerful impact on how slaves were represented. The novel produces a better understanding of the issue of slavery through the lives and emotions of the slaves.
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Summary: Beloved
Review: I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved. Romans 9:25 Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is powerful and bold. The novel tries to explain the horrors of the institution of slavery, and the horrors that lived on long after slavery was dead. This novel has a brilliant purpose, but that purpose is overshadowed by the vulgar and grotesque sexual actions constantly being displayed in the book. The novel is about an ex- slave woman named Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, and her struggles to escape from slavery and keep her children from becoming slaves themselves. Later the hidden struggle between beloved, one of the antagonists of the novel, and Sethe emerges and is clear to the outside reader, while it is oblivious to the latter.
The novel is set during the reconstruction era in a small town outside of Cincinnati, Ohio. Through the use of flashbacks, brought on by Paul D, an old friend of Sethe's and another antagonist in the novel, the author lets us visit Sethe's past life and learn what she went through while she was enslaved. The horrors of Sethe's life, past and present, are also conveyed to the reader through the author's use of symbolism, foreshadowing, mysticism, and other literary devices. This book is a challenging read, and is not easily understood, but if the vulgarity and grotesqueness are overlooked, then this is a captivating story about the little known horrors of slavery.
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Summary: Beloved
Review: Beloved by Toni Morrison is set in the small town outside of Cincinnati, Ohio in the late 1800s. The novel shows some of the horrific events that happened because of slavery. Sethe, the main character, is the mother of four children and a run away slave. When her owner comes to find her and her children all she cares about is saving her children from slavery. Trying to save her children, Sethe kills her oldest daughter. After this event Sethe's sons leave, and it is only herself, her youngest daughter Denver, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, and her lover Paul D left, until a mysterious girl appears at Sethe's home calling herself by the same name that appeared on her daughter's tombstone. Toni Morrison does a great job in showing you the theme of her novel: the fact that slavery was a horrible thing that caused many unforgettable events to take place, and that many people do not realize the extent of slavery. With the use of metaphors, allusions, flashbacks, symbolism, folklore, magic, and mysticism Morrison's Beloved requires very deep thinking and forces you to take the time to comprehend everything you read. The story line of the novel is very enjoyable, but some of the obscene language used and events described is almost enough to ruin the novel. If you can get past all the vulgarity, Beloved is a great story about slavery, but if you cannot I would not suggest reading it. The novel is very difficult to follow and comprehend, but if you just read the story as it is written and do not try to figure out what everything really means, you will enjoy the book a lot more.
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Summary: What a book!
Review: Beloved is an amazing book. Reading it is both frustrating and enjoyable. The beginning of the story barely captured my attention as it described 124 and I couldn't fully comprehend the events until a couple chapters later, but as I continued to read and attempted to put the past pages of the book together I really started to enjoy the book. The book's description of slavery's effect on the characters, both physically and emotionally was strong and clear. I am already familiar with the consequence of slavery on its victims but I have never read such a vivid piece of writing that instills such images of what these victims go through as they are deprived of the usual life-teaching experiences. Sethe, who's love is shown as the strongest of all black slave women, can't help but do what she thinks is the best for her 'best thing', which are her four young children. She knows nothing else but to try to kill them instead of seeing them endure slavery as she did.
When I learned how Sethe had tried to kill her children and why, I was shocked. It showed how much the blacks despised slavery and to what great lengths they went to stop it from happening all over again.
As a student blind of symbolism, I had a hard time deciphering or catching many of them. I was amazed at how much symbolism I could acquire through repetitive reading. Input from peers helped me a great deal in understanding the book through a figurative view.
This book is the best educational trip I could ever experience in school. It was interesting, and kept my eyes glued to each page as the pieces of each character's lives were pieced together. It may have been very hard to follow, actually one of the hardest books I ever read, but getting to the end without skipping pages is worth the head-thinking trouble.
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Summary: Beloved
Review: Beloved, a winner of the noble prize in literature and of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction is Toni's best novel. The way its written makes the reader believe the haunting view of how it was for slaves back in the 1870's.I think this novel was very well thought out about the characters and the main events that lead to the next even. Sethe is the strong character in the novel, who has experienced so much terror and cruelty in her life. The other main charter I would say is Beloved who is nameless but is called beloved by her mother. Sethe's baby girl who grows up and comes back as the haunter. Sethe shows the reader the kind of hard life a black person had to go through. Sethe's mother was a slave, Sethe herself was a slave, but she was not going to let her kids be slaves, and that l led to her third child to die .Many things happen in 124. Toni does a great job in making every details meaningful, whether it with history or with past events within the novel's story. If you look at the door number that Sethe and her family lives in the number three is missing, it's because her third child is missing, so this novel is very educational and very inspiring to read. It's not the easiest novel to read but you'll see it's worth your time.
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Summary: Faulkner's South from the other side of the Tracks
Review: Now a motion picture and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, this story is the view of Faulkner's South from the other side of the railroad tracks. Like most classics it deals with history, trauma and healing, survival and memory. The main character (Sethe) is, as usual in a Morrison book, a Black Woman writ Big with conflicts with her past, with the slave society she was born into, with the crossing to freedom, and with the birth of her infant daughter whom she kills rather than surrender to the slave masters. Whether that daughter returns as a ghost or not doesn't matter much. My feeling is that everything, or almost everything, about Beloved is explainable without supernatural intervention. Advice: Read this for the poetry and the insight into black culture and for the reduction of slavery into one woman's poignant story. Then suffer through the movie. Then reread the book and appreciate it for what it really is: A redemptive work of art.
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