Research Paper on:
The Structure of Beloved by Toni Morrison

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
landscape of her protagonist, Sethe, a former slave. Unlike conventional storytelling, Morrison makes no efforts to offer a chronological retelling of her Sethes life. Rather, Morrison utilizes the raw material  of that life as metaphorical "clay" from which the author sculpts imagery that allows the reader to enter into her Sethes mental landscape. In this manner, Morrison conveys not only  what happened to Sethe, but also how events impacted the psychological perspective of this woman, who is tortured by memory and past experience. Sethe lives apart from the rest  of the African American community. A great deal of Sethes energy is devoted to the constant task of beating down painful memories of her past. After she managed to escape  from slavery and journey to Ohio, Sethe was followed by her masters nephews and faced being extradited back to the South as "property." The law prior to the Civil War  allowed Southern slave owners to retrieve runaway slaves in this manner. Rather than allow this to happen -- rather than see herself and her children subjected to the horrors  of slavery -- Sethe takes her children to the coal shed with the intention of first killing them, and then herself. Sethe cuts the throat of her "almost crawling" baby  girl before she is stopped. It is this sin -- the sin of Cain, to murder ones own flesh and blood -- that traps Sethe both in time and  space, where she has no "dreams of her own" (Morrison, 1987, p. 20). Yet, it is also this action that saves herself and her children from more years of  slavery, as the slaveowners are both mystified and horrified by her actions and leave Sethe to the Ohio court system. Morrison examines the psychic repercussions of this act, slipping