Beloved

Beloved Essay: Flashbacks


Revisit the Dry Well, Find a New Spring


  Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved swims like a garden pond full of minnows with thoughts and memories of days gone by.   Each memory is like a drop of water, and when one person brings up enough drops, a trickle of a stream is formed. The trickles make their way down the shallow slopes and inclines, pushing leaves, twigs, and other barriers out of the way, leaving small bits of themselves behind so their paths can be traced again.   There is a point, a vertex, a lair, where many peoples streams unite in a valley, in the heart of a pebble lined brook, and it is here that their trickles of days gone by fuse with each other, and float hand in hand until they ultimately settle to form the backyard pond.  








  By unveiling her pond drop by drop, memory by memory, Morrison allows us to travel down the paths that converged together to create the story of Beloved. When an author uses a direct path to a story the readers tend to dismiss the unknown past of the characters, focusing instead on their forthcoming depicted futures.   In Beloved however, the reader is forced to take trips back to the past, which help tie together the relationships of today.   The repetitive nature of the narration also allows the reader to assimilate portions of the text that were inevidently connected to form an entwined net of relationships. For example, each time a new character is introduced, you are brought back into the memory of another character, to identify the new comers’ relationship to the story. In most text, a new character would be simply introduced with their importance to the here and now of a story, instead of the shared history amongst other characters. Most history that is shared between characters in most books is history that writes itself during the course of the book, as opposed to the memories formed so long ago, that it takes a great deal of time to bring them back...