Sethe Can Do No Wrong (Landres)

 May 16

“It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that,” (194) Sethe tells Paul D., upon his suggestion that Sethe’s murder was perhaps worse than Sethe’s and the children’s return to Sweet Home and Schoolteacher. Throughout this discussion, Sethe continuously turns about the kitchen table where Paul D is sitting, listening. Sethe’s action is compared to a wheel that never stops (187) never changes direction (189).

    Sethe is extraordinarily single-minded and utterly lacking the imaginary faculty that allows us to live in the world. Of her, Paul D thinks “[t]his here new Sethe didn’t know where the world stopped and she began” (193). In her isolation as a slave, she had only her experience, or as she sees it, her knowledge, to consult (for example, she had to figure out for herself how to respond to the stages of infant and child physical development because there was nobody for her to talk to (188)). So the world becomes her world, all she knows. Love, safety either are or they aren’t; there are not gradients for Sethe, no questions of complication: yes or “No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple” (193). Sethe is her own whole world and the only governor of it now that she is free, but in another sense, she does not consider herself part of the world of evil, which is strictly the realm of the white slaveholders. Sethe can do no wrong.

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