Character Development

Like everyone else, I find it difficult to understand and follow what is going on in Beloved. Of course, the class discussions help with this and help me think of the novel in more of analytical way. The novel tells a complex story of a family with a complicated history that continues to haunt them, literally. Morrison tells the story through multiple perspectives and uses rememory so the reader gets the whole story. I think that think that this is very effective, especially with character development.

We learn about each character in the present tense and typically we readers see them in a positive light. However, as we get more of their history and learn about terrible things that happened to them and terrible things they’ve done, we get mixed feelings about them. For example, when we officially learned that Sethe killed her baby. We suspected it at the beginning, however I never saw her as a bad person. When we learn that she does in fact kill her baby, it makes Sethe a very complex character.

I think that using rememory throughout the novel is an effective way of developing the characters. We never learn too much at once and are able to develop opinions of the people based on who they are at the present, not their past and possibly terrible actions that they may have done. As Mr. Mitchell said in class, if we learned that Sethe killed her baby at the beginning of the novel, our entire image of her would be tainted by the blood on her hands.

Another way that using rememory is effective is that it shows that real people are complex. You can be a wonderful, loving person, which is how I feel towards Sethe, and still do awful things. Morrsion is constructing complex characters in a different way than usual, creating a great novel.