Beloved, By Toni Morrison

This thesis aims to investigate and understand the use of focalization in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Beloved tells the story of Sethe, a slave who escapes slavery, only then to be faced with the reality of being recaptured by her “master” and returned to slavery. When her “master” seeks out to recapture her, Sethe sets out to murder all of her children in an attempt to protect them from being put back into slavery and stating that she was “trying to put my babies where they would be safe”. However, Sethe was only successful in killing her eldest daughter, whom she buries with a tombstone that reads “Beloved”. Years pass and Sethe is plagued by a malevolent spirit, whom she attributes to be the ghost of her dead daughter. This causes Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, to run away from home at age 13. It has also caused her daughter to be reclusive and housebound. Sethe is later confronted with a young woman named Beloved whom Sethe feels charmed by and invites to stay with her in her house, against the advices of Sethe’s house partner Paul. Circumstances transgress and Sethe is forced to tell Paul about her attempts at murdering her children to protect them from slavery. Horrified, Paul leaves and, after having given Sethe a sense of stability and reality, Sethe begins to part further from reality. Sethe begins to pamper
While we may never truly know Morrison’s plan with heading in this direction, we can assume that this was intentional. As the whole novel is dedicated to the trauma, duress, guilt and the chaos experienced by Sethe and her family, this chaotic display of introspection and narrative potentiates the theme of chaos that is so interwoven throughout the novel. It almost mirrors the true feelings of the characters and how they must be thinking and feeling, bouncing back and forth between different thoughts, stressors and