Beloved Rememory

Beloved by Toni Morrison is told in much the same way the human mind works, shifting its focus from present experience to past experienced events and demonstrating how they are inexplicitly linked. The changes of focus are brought on by the sounds, sights or the touch of familiarity. These sensations arouse the past in all its disgust and horror forcing the characters to confront the suffering and trauma they experienced head on. Although they work to avoid these imposed memories through the act of rememory, they are ordained to accept these experiences as there own and within their own consciousness or fight to keep the pain of the event of slavery from impeding them in their everyday life. Denver and Sethe are two characters with immense histories who have constant rememories that keep them bound to the past. Sethe wants to forget her past and for the stories and Beloved to disappear, even though this repression means forgetting who she is, and where she came from. Denver though, clings to the stories that she has been told and wants to know more about her early life through the memories of others. Denver is just being told, informed of what happen but she has no experience of actually being part of the atrocities. Whereas Denver doesn’t experience the past as memories but rememories, reliving the experience every single time someone brings it
To someone who’s been told everything they know about their past, like Denver, its just a story, she is emotionless towards the past. Whereas to someone like Sethe that past is fact, hard disgusting fact. Yet, even when Sethe is tormented by the things she can’t forget, she still does not want to forget because in doing so she lets go of the reality of the events that occurred and knows they will be