Summary Of Slavery In Toni Morrison's Beloved

The novel Beloved, written by Toni Morrison, follows the lives of those who survived the horrors of slavery and how these experiences affect their decisions/actions in the future. Each character faced different types of mistreatment due to slavery, whether it was mentally or physically, that caused a significant impact to their lives. All these mistreatments the characters had to face had caused them to act a certain way in the future. Morrison would use multiple literary device in each character to show what each character had to face when they were slaves and that would allow the character to think their action in the future was justifiable weather it was morally right or if it was morally wrong. Throughout the book, multiple literary devices …show more content…
One of the characters in the book was Sethe, a runaway slave that was sexually abused. Morrison had used repetition and symbolism to portray Sethe’s past experience and it shows who Sethe is and what is important to her. When she was pregnant and tried to escape, the schoolteacher’s nephews had raped her and stole her milk. “After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it.” (pg.19). This was where Sethe was talking to Paul D and explaining what had happen. As She told Paul D that she was raped and the nephew had took her milk, she mainly focus on the part that her milk got taken away. “ They used cowhide on you?’ ‘And they took my milk.’ ‘They beat you and you was pregnant?’ ‘And they took my milk!” (pg.20). In this part, it shows how Sethe did not really care about the beating that the nephew had done to her but she …show more content…
“ Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger women holding a blood-soaked child to her chest…” (pg.171). Morrison had used imagery to show a picture of what Sethe had decided to do when she saw the school teacher. It shows that her past experience had made her want to kill her kids so they would not need to experience what she had been through. “She ain’t crazy. She love those children. She was trying to out-hurt the hurter.” (pg.276). That quote shows diction, “out-hurt the hurter” it was Stamp Paid’s way of justifying Sethe’s action to kill her children. Morrison had chose those words to simply explain how Sethe does not want to give satisfaction to the white people that they won and that is one way to protect her children. So in order for her to do that decides to kill her children so they would not be put into slavery and had to face what she had been through when she was a slave. This shows how Sethe’s past and what she had been through had cause her to try to make her decision kill all her