Beloved Essay

Beloved Essay

In the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison delves into not only her characters" painful pasts, but also the painful past of the injustice of slavery.   Few authors can invoke the heart-wrenching imagery and feelings that Toni Morrison can in her novels, and her novel Beloved is a prime example of this.   Toni Morrison writes in such a way that her readers, along with her characters, find themselves tangled and struggling in a web of history, pain, truth, suffering, and the past.   While many of Toni Morrison"s novels deal with aspects of her characters" past lives and their struggles with how to embrace or reject their memories, Beloved is a novel in which the past plays an exceptionally important role.   Most often, it is Beloved"s main character Sethe whose relationship to the past is examined through her murdered daughter Beloved.   However, Paul D"s painful past and memories are intricately linked to both Sethe and Beloved and should be examined as well.   Paul D"s very conscious struggles to suppress his past are represented through a prominent, reoccurring symbol in Morrison"s text, and are also mediated through his contact with Sethe"s life and past as well as through story telling.
The most explicit way in which Paul D"s relationship to the past is represented in the text is through the metaphor and symbol of the tobacco tin in his chest.   As readers, we are first introduced to this symbol on page 72, immediately after Paul D finishes telling Sethe a story, and we are told by the narrator that Paul D "?would keep the rest where it belonged: in that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut" (p 72-73).   This introduction to the tobacco tin in Paul D"s chest, in place of where his heart should be, allows us to understand that Paul D seems to negotiate with his past through the symbol of the tobacco tin.   His negotiation is designed in such a way that he has allowed himself to hold on to all the various pieces of...