Beloved by Morrison OR Gilead by Robinson OR Fugitive Pieces by Michaels OR Mornings in Jenin by Abulhawa - Essay Example

The story centers upon the fictional character Sethe, who lives in a small “gray and white house on Bluestone Road” (Morrison 1) with her surviving daughter Denver. As the story opens, it is made clear that Sethe's two sons, Howard and Bugler, both ran away at some point prior to the story opening because they couldn't deal with strange, ghostly activities happening at the house. Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and the woman who taught Sethe how to live again after escaping slavery, also once lived with them but died.

Soon after the reader is introduced to these characters, a new character comes in. Paul D was one of the slaves Sethe had worked with on Sweet Home, a Kentucky plantation where she, her husband and several others had been cruelly treated. Upon her escape, an event that happened many years earlier, Sethe murdered her youngest child, a girl, desperately attempting to keep her baby from experiencing the type of degradation and abuse Sethe experienced at the hands of Schoolteacher when she thought she was about to fall back into slavery.

It is this spirit who returns to haunt her family in later years, finally manifesting itself in the bodily form of Beloved. Morrison’s deliberate use of the ambiguous in her statement of the story that “was not a story to pass on” as well as the ambiguous nature of her narrative style allows her to say a great deal without saying much. This ability of authors to express the incomprehensible is behind Catherine Belsey’s theory of a ‘crisis in subjectivity’ or ‘split subject.’ “Entry into language inevitably creates a division between the subject of the enunciation and the subject of the enonce, the ‘I’ who speaks and the ‘I’ who is the subject of discourse.

The Subject is held in place in the discourse by the use of ‘I,’ but the ‘I’ of this discourse is always a stand in, a substitute, for the ‘I’ who speaks.” Another theory by Julia Kristeva introduces the idea of a “divided subject, even a pluralized subject, that occupies not a place of enunciation, but permutable, multiple, and mobile places.” Morrison’s approach in Beloved is an experimental narrative approach that allows a variety of reading levels while still telling a difficult story.

In this sense, narrative is both a primary technical resource and serves as a theme that illustrates how adjustment to a life free of slavery was perhaps as difficult as conforming to life as a slave. Regardless of how the story is interpreted, although Sethe had escaped to freedom with her children and her life, her husband was missing and fear remained permanently rooted in her heart. The merest thought that she and her children might be taken back into slavery was worse than death so she attempted to kill the children rather than allow them to live the same sort of life she'd experienced as a slave.

Despite the fact that she is free and safe, Sethe cannot escape the haunting memories of her past. The scene of possible recapture takes place just after she has had a chance to understand what it means to be free. She had followed Baby Suggs out to the clearing in the woods where Baby Suggs gave the children permission to run and the mothers permission to hear them laugh and the men permission to dance and