Toni Morrison Beloved Analysis

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, a number of former slaves gather at the house of Sethe upon the appearance of her dead daughter, to try to understand the unspeakable event that occurred almost two decades previous, as well as the existence of Beloved’s ghost. Through this struggle to comprehend the past through the lens of characters who experienced the inherent degradation of slavery, Morrison comments on the nature of freedom. Freedom is a state of mind, as Toni Morrison portrays through the complex thoughts and actions of her characters around the horrific event that occured at 124 Bluestone Road.

In their beginning, the characters are slaves, and some feel the effects more acutely than others. This is the most evident with the character of

Paul D yearns for freedom and escape--but through death. This escape from reality is fueled by violence and is created by the metaphorical killing of all the good things Paul D has ever experienced. More dramatic than this is what happens to his foil, Sixo, a fellow slave from Sweet Home who dares to dream of running away with a female slave named the Thirty-Mile Woman who he wants to marry. Because Sixo dares to dream, and act on that dream, he is captured and killed. When they are caught, Paul D obeys orders. “Sixo’s language, by contrast, is literally song and laughter—but this ‘vocabulary’ gets him killed. The long, rebellious melody he sings while he is being captured and bound convinces Sixo’s owner [...] that Sixo will never be ‘suitable’ for slavery” (Toutonghi 27) Sixo is “not sufficiently debased for Schoolteacher’s type of slavery,” thanks to his cheerfulness in the face of death; he has found something more precious--the knowledge that he has a child growing in the womb of his lover, who is assumed to have escaped (Toutonghi 27). As a result, he is not merely killed, but tied up and burned alive with damp wood. Throughout this long and excruciating death, he continues