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After reading Toni Morrison's  Beloved , I return to question the significance of the ghost to the entire story. Frequently associated with the cause of fear, a ghost is supposed to startle and bring horror to the characters. However, fear is never mentioned in their reactions to the existence of the ghost named Beloved. Only familiarity is prevalent as if they have been waiting for Beloved for so long and if Beloved is part of them all. To explain the characters' comfortable reactions to such a supernatural phenomenon, Toni Morrison even describes Beloved's personalities that depend on the feelings of different characters. For example, Denver senses her as lonely, while Sethe senses rebuked. Paul D is a bit exceptional in that he is not frightened of Beloved at first. Her appearance gives him a chance to show manhood to be protective of his love, Sethe. However, she scares him when his irresistibility to her sexual invite arises and challenges his sense of manhood. Besides...

I Got A Woman Who Helps My Mind Maxfield Fleishman There are too many things to say about Beloved . It contains everything: all the kaleidoscopic horrors and joys which fill the "unliveable" lives of Black Americans. Beloved  shows how love and fear will have you killing what's yours to keep it yours. It tells of how those who die don't stay dead, but also how they'll never rightly live among the living. Beloved  depicts the amputations of trauma: how a life full of struggle severs parts of you and puts them away for you to maybe dig up one day, but for now to stuff them overflowing into a tobacco box heart. Beloved says that the same person who kills their child can go ice skating on no skates, and that the man who wears a bit and eats living wild birds in the woods can bathe his beloved part by part.  In honor of Phaedrus , I'll say something about love. Paul D suddenly remembers something Sixo said about his Thirty-Mile Woman. "She is a friend of my mi...

 Final Thoughts on Beloved: “Beloved” has been the most explicit book I’ve read at my time at St. John’s, and I’m so glad to have spoken about topics that usually aren’t talked about. When talking about Beloved, I think, this is what St. John’s is supposed to be: a place where people talk about what nobody talks about—where we come to understand the most unconventional and hidden things and our deepest feelings. In doing so we are forced to wake up—to look at history and life for what it truly is even if it is uncomfortable to do so.   --- One of the things that stood out to me most was when Sethe said that true freedom is the liberty to love whoever you want, as much as you want. Not only did this sentiment stick out to me because of my own desire for this kind of freedom, but also because of it's strangeness as a concept. Despite all the goodness and happiness that love entails, love is nevertheless yoke--a burden. Love gives someone power over you, and the greater ...

  The unbearable life of Black people in BELOVED. HUMAN MALICE. That word comes to my mind when reading BELOVED.   For Toni Morrison introduces us to the cruel history of slavery through an intense and very detailed narrative of our main characters who were slaves and lived in the same home called “Sweet Home”. Yet there is no sweetness to this home, as it is rather the place where inhuman and horrific events were conducted by white people and at the expense of black people’s freedom and free will.   For instance, Toni Morrison shows the cruelty of slavery through our main character Sethe. By white standards, she is worth more than black men since she can be a potential mother who could breed future slaves. Putting an economical value to people as if they were mere objects, shows already the kind of mentality needed by white people to not falter at their atrocities or at the fact they own slaves. Hence, such objectification of black people happens from white people’s ...

    Brief Analysis of The Narrator in “Lost Much As Twice” In this poem, we see the impotence and powerlessness of our narrator, she cannot control life and death, and hence she must be subjected unwillingly to lose and be separated from two dear people to her.   This state of not having control over death and loss, makes her have an unstable relationship with God. The main reason for this instability is the fact that she alters her impression about God, she is in limbo wherein at one moment she attaches positive connotations to God, and at other times she gives God negative attributes. For instance, she positively acknowledges the fact that God is the creator and source of all life by referring to Him as a ‘Father’. But later one, she calls God a ‘banker’ and a ‘theft’, as she feels offended and attacked by God from the mere fact that she makes Him responsible for taking away the two people dear to her. By describing God with two opposite tones, we see the kind of ...

 In both Being and Time and the Letter, Heidegger talked about the temporality of Dasein. It might be summarized in this way: Dasein is thrown out of its past, fallen into its present, and projected towards its future. Unlike some traditional metaphysics, Heidegger seemed to regard these three happening at the same time. Every single one of them takes place only when the other two are also present. Interestingly, one of Morrison's description of Ella and her attitude towards Sethe's situation also included all three dimensions of time:  "The future was sunset; the past something to leave behind. And if it didn't stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out...'Sufficient unto the day is the eveil thereof', and nobody needed more; nobody needed a grown-up evil sitting at the table with a grudge. As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place...Ella respected it...but this was an invasion."(302) To me, this is an ambiguous account on the three di...

  Exorcising Beloved //Anjelo Reyes In a few of our classes, we’ve discussed the particularly possessive quality about Sethe’s love. It is a kind of love that is so strong that it lacks any sense of boundary--lacks all conventional sense of ethics. However, it seems that this possessiveness does not solely apply to Sethe, but to Denver as well. As we see, Denver was the first show a deep obsession with Beloved. In a dog-like manner, Denver would follow Beloved everywhere, always careful to keep an eye on her lest she disappears. Sethe was the same when she knew Beloved was her daughter. Both, therefore, sought so strongly to keep Beloved in their lives—to hold her, and to confine her to the point of literal possession.  In this way, Sethe and Denver are the possessors, and Beloved is the possessed. She is possessed by the spirit of the dead baby—by Sethe’s and Denver’s pasts.  There are a different number of ways to support this. To begin with, we previously di...

This is a follow-up to our class discussion today. I think Ms. Landres' misgivings have to be taken very seriously. As I'm thinking now, either Sethe was right to do it, or wrong, or beyond right and wrong -- that is, beyond judgment or self-judgment. If right, she might be right in principle and in the practical decision (that there are some things worse than death and she has a responsibility to protect her kids from that), or right in principle but wrong in practical decision (there are some things worse than death but no mother has the right to kill her kids). If wrong, she is wrong in both principle and application, or, again, only one of them. If she is beyond judgment, would you be willing to grant the same exemption from judgment to other parents who abuse or even kill their kids from what seems to them to be good moral principles? These parents are, sadly, not that rare. If you're not willing to grant this to other parents, who all might have different relations to...

When I imagine a person - my own mother, my father, my dearest friends, or someone I have no relation to, I cannot imagine them as property, as valued by a price. This is not my world. But that was the world of the south, which is to say, a completely normal world. I'm imagining the tens of thousands of white people who simultaneously were capable of seeing their relatives and friends as people like themselves, while deeming the humans they owned as priced property, and I'm horrified reflecting on this fact, realizing that I myself could have been born at that time in such a place which could have so forcefully convinced me that my skin was a superior white and that others were the color of inferiority, worth something insofar as they would support my superiorty.  The human who prices another has erased the human in the human, has turned the human into an terribly strange object, an economic tool. As a priced object, the person's worth fluctuates with market tides, with the...