Honors Novel #2

Although the community's shunning of Seth and Baby Sugg's for thinking too highly of themselves is unair, the fact that Seth prefers to steal food from the restaurant where she works rather than wait in line with the rest of the black community, shows that she does consider herself different from the rest of the blacks in her neighborhood, and also unveils her uncivilized free and wild thinking.

Sethe's most striking charactersistics, however, is her devotion to her children. Unwilling to release her children to the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma she endured as a slave, she tries to murder them; demonstrating "her version" of motherly love and protection. Her memories of this cruel act and the brutality she to suffered as a slave, penetrate her everyday life and leads her to believe that past trauma can never really be erased, but continued somehow in the present. As a result, Sethe spends her life attempting to avoid encounters with the past. Did Sethe's fear of the past lead her to ignore the overwhelming evidence that beloved was the reincarnation of her murdered daughter?

Still, even after she acknowledges Beloved's identity, Sethe shows herself to still be enslaved by the past, because she quickly surrenders to Beloved's demands and allows her to be consumed by Beloved. Only when Sethe learns to confront the past head-on and maintain herself in it's presence, can she be able to free herself from it's power and begin to live peacefuilly and responsibly in the present.

Where slavery exists, everyone suffers a loss of humanity and compassion. When schoolteacher's nephews seize Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter, her uncivilized free and wild thinking begins to play a very important role in her actions. From risking her life escaping the horrific farm, to forcefully murdering her daughter. But could you really blame her? I mean after living and enduring such a rutheless lifestyle and environment for so long, her mind just simply began to stray further and further away from a "normal humans" way of thinking. But it's not her fault. She was hidden so far back into the darkness of all the negative situations that she had experienced, that the only thing her mind focused on was doing whatever she could to escape and protect her children----attempting to kill them was her first and only option.

I believe that Morrison's main objective was to recover a history that had been lost to the damage of forced silences and influenced forgefulness. As a reader, from Sethe's experiences, I learned that before a stable future can be created, the "ghosts" of the past must first be confronted and understood. Throughout the novel, I noticed that Morrison set the plot up so that like Sethe, readers must first confront the history and details of slavery in order to address and understand it's legacy.