Critical Commentary: Beloved

Critical commentary In her essay, The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Linda Krumholtz shows how the story of Beloved is Sethe's healing ritual to overcome years of mental slavery, even years after she has been physically free. In simple terms, it is about the way that Sethe overcomes the guilt of killing her child and the painful memories of slavery. Krumholtz describes the style in which the novel is written, that being that the most traumatizing event (the killing of her child) is the deed that is not spoken of until the end and that it is repressed from the novel similarly to how Sethe’s own mind represses it. Sethe’s struggle to cope with this memory is silent throughout the novel until she is directly faced with it and it almost destroys her. She tries to give everything she can to Beloved, even her life. She does this to justify what she did, not only to herself, but to Beloved as well. Krumholtz adds quite a bit to my understanding of the novel. When I was finished reading, I felt like the novel was told almost in the style as from someone with PTSD ( Post- traumatic stress disorder). I say this because of all of the flashbacks and the way those flashbacks are portrayed. They almost never tell you when something happened or how long ago, making it seem like those events are still happening in the minds of the characters. Both this analysis and Krumholtz work very well together bring another light into the strange novel that Beloved is.