AN EXTENSIVE ANALYSIS OF BELOVED, BY TONI MORRISON Essay

AN EXTENSIVE ANALYSIS OF BELOVED, BY TONI MORRISON - Essay Example But before we can relegate the statement to this easy explanation, we must consider the answers to what is ‘it’ referring to; an answer that can change depending upon the way in which it is read. By understanding the general plot line of the story and the reasons why Morrison might have built this deliberately ambiguous statement into the novel, it becomes possible to understand how the various approaches might interpret the story differently in such a way that most of them reach the same final conclusion – that here is a story that absolutely must be told. The story follows the fictional character Sethe, who lives in a small â€Å"gray and white house on Bluestone Road† (Morrison, 1988, p. 1) with her daughter Denver. Throughout the story, we learn these two women have not always lived alone, nor will they remain alone as the story progresses. As the story opens, we learn that Sethe and Denver once lived with Sethe’s two sons, Howard and Bugler, who have both run away as a result of strange, ghostly activities happening at the house. They also once lived with Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and the woman who taught Sethe how to live again after escaping slavery. Very quickly, we are also introduced to Paul D, who was one of the men Sethe had worked with on Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation where she, her husband and several others had been cruelly treated as slaves. Upon her escape from slavery, an event that happened many years prior to the opening of the story, Sethe murdered her youngest child, a girl, as p art of a desperate attempt to keep her precious daughter from experiencing the type of degradation and abuse Sethe experienced at the hands of Schoolteacher. It is this child who returns to haunt her mother and family in later years, manifesting itself in the bodily form of Beloved, who feeds off of this desperation to eventually bring about a final resolution. It is through