Claude Mckay's Outcast Essay

In Claude Mckay’s poem “Outcast,” he wrote: “Something in me is lost, forever lost,/Some vital thing has gone out of my heart,/And I must walk the way of life a ghost/ Among the sons of earth, a thing apart;/For I was born, far from my native clime,/Under the white man's menace, out of time.” In Beloved, Toni Morrison depicts these ideas of racism, misery, and disharmony through the story of a former slave, Sethe, who is ostracized from her community because she killed her own child to protect them from slavery. This dead child then comes back to haunt Sethe in the form of the character Beloved, who begins to drain Sethe of her vitality and ambition, and is only stopped by the community’s exorcism and Sethe’s confrontation with the past. In Beloved, Morrison creates the …show more content…
Beloved grows as Sethe herself shrinks, in actual size and by mentally cowering to Beloved’s overwhelming prowess. Additionally, the reader is once again met with the color motif. Overall, red and pink seem to exemplify vitality, and the instinctive nature of human existence. Yet, in Beloved, vitality often goes hand in hand with mortality, and red images refer to life and death, to presence and absence. Baby Suggs herself often focused on colors, and in this particular quote, the pink that she called for seems to connote Beloved herself. After all, it was always the color pink that the author emphasized when referring to the dead child’s gravestone, saying, “It was as though one day she saw red baby blood, another day the pink gravestone chips, and that was the last of it” (47). In a way, the Grandmother seemed to be calling for the lost child, and more metaphorically, she was calling for her own past before she died, of better, more peaceful, days, all playing a part in the Grandmother’s own clearing of her