The Purpose of Beloved, A Reflection By Lindsey Bogott

Now that I have finished Beloved I can firmly say that this novel has changed my perception on slavery and broadened my sympathy for the African-American race. I am not sure how Toni Morrison did it, but the way she incorporated several layers of psychological emotion to make it feel like a typical, complicated human being made the historical side of it feel more relevant and real. What I especially thought was fascinating and clever was how she used Beloved to be the linkage to the past. Without Beloved, the readers would lose the historical significance of the novel that allows the readers to grasp what is really going on. Because of this, I found that the Maya Angelou quote that I had previously reflected on is basically the sole purpose of the novel, to reflect on the past in order to move on from it.

The past is always a haunting reminder, especially if something tragic occurred like in the case for Sethe. Yet for Sethe, Beloved was her haunting reminder (literally), acting as a leech, only leaving when she thought she had sucked all the blood away. The character Beloved is so abstract, yet that is why I love her. For such a long time I did not understand her or her purpose until I was nearly to the end of the book, reading the poems, that I finally understood her symbolic purpose. Even though she is technically dead, Sethe, and the other characters, keep her alive because they think about her so often, it feels as if she never left. The more they think about her, the more they think of the way she died and the events that led up to her death. Beloved forces them to reflect on their past, makes them weak again so that they can build the strength to get out of their pit of despair and move on.

Everybody needs a Beloved in their life because everyone has gone through an event in their life that haunts them or holds them back from achieving. While Morrison’s profound novel was to shed the light on how it was to be a slave before and after the Emancipation, which she did an exceptional job at, it was also to express the fact that we all just need to move on and learn from our mistakes. In a sense by reading Beloved we are also forced to reflect on slavery and the conditions of African-American life, and now that we have, we can teach others to do the same then work together to make a brighter, more positive and safe future for everyone.