Main characters of Beloved

Beloved is a story written as a cluster of images ‘or re memories. They are told as separate and distinct events tied together thorough storytelling and personal narrative. The novel is also written out of time sequence. As the main character, Sethe, struggles to come to terms with her past, the reader gets bits and pieces of Sethe’s story as she gradually recollects her history. It is from these fragments that an entire story is woven. . 

Memories provide a framework for creating meaning in one’s own life as well as in the lives of others. In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self-imposed prison of memory. She expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. 

Memories in Toni Morrison are generally scarring, although they can be visible or invisible. In Beloved, Sethe will forever carry a tree on her back, “A chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves” , in memorandum of the nightmare life that she had at Sweet Home, a tree of scars commemorating the beating that made her run away and caused her husband’s breakdown. Sethe has obvious scars which Paul D. and Amy Denver can see, and name, and use to make Sethe recount the tale behind them — and yet Sethe herself is closed to their significance. Perhaps Paul D is in a worse position than Sethe: his scars are internal and he has to fight his own battles he has never spoken of his time under the Schoolteacher in Sweet Home to anyone. Pau) D has none of the physical markings of trauma for someone like Sethe to kiss better even his eyes do not have the usual wildness which Sethe believes follows on from having worn a bit. So, his fight with memory holds the potential for more pain than Sethe, 

It is not the repression of memory which haunts Sethe, she is plagued by memories, but Paul D has to conquer his repression and his tendency to keep his painful remembering. The most obvious symptom of focusing on the past is the tendency of individuals to only remember those stories which are not fit to be passed on. 

As an embodiment of the past, Beloved is a hair-shirt welcomed by Sethe until she begins to devour her, showing all the greediness and desire for possession, until Sethe finally resolves the situation into one where the past perpetually haunts them only now as part of them and in their understanding rather than their fear. The power of Beloved and all that she represents over the residents of 124 is illustrative of the totalising power of the past. Baby Suggs also suffers by remembering her past. Though she had eight children, she was allowed to keep only one son.