The Inadequacy Of Language In Toni Morrison's Beloved

“Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war,” said Toni Morrison in her acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize. But if language is inadequate then how else can we testify to unbearable things that happen to human beings? In storytelling the characters’ emotions are personified through the way in which they remember or “disremember” certain events. In her speech Morrison also says, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” Language is the means by which we communicate, through which we share ideas, emotions, opinions. Language really is all we have, but it is still not enough. The inadequacy of language is shown by the way Morrison uses it. She doesn’t try to make language adequate, …show more content…
The use of time is a tool she employs to express the characters’ emotions referring to specific memories. She shuttles the reader back and forth, in and out, of the characters’ stories in order to tell the larger story at hand. This is the story of the atrocity of slavery, something so horrendous that it caused a woman to attempt to murder her own children and succeed in killing one of them in order to save them from it. The book is a collection of stories from various characters and perspectives as they look back on their lives. The order in which the memories are told shows the immortality of memory; as one memory arises it triggers more memories. In this way, memories never die, they can be forgotten but always have the potential to return. “Denver picked at her fingernails. ‘If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.’ Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. ‘Nothing ever does,’ she said” (35). According to Sethe nothing ever dies, including memories; memories may be hidden away or forgotten, but they never die. These memories are emphasized and deemphasized by the way Morrison discusses them for different lengths of time. The way she writes makes it clear to the reader which parts are important to which characters and how they feel about something. If a character lingers on a certain event that event likely is associated with great emotion, happiness or fear that …show more content…
So they forgot her. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep… They could touch it if they like, but don’t, because they know things will never be the same if they do” (260). It is best for everyone to forget Beloved and what she represents, because not doing so would be too hard. Beloved represents the suffering of so many people; it is unfathomable and too difficult to keep her and what she represents alive. Burying these memories make it easier to go on. “Down by the stream in the back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in the, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (260). Morrison is recalling the footprints of all who Beloved represents -- she wasn’t one ‘person’ but the millions who lost their lives to slavery, and her story isn’t one story but the stories of all those who endured a similar fate. For this reason Morrison may say, “This is not a story to pass on” because it wasn’t one story and it wasn’t just Beloved’s story to tell. Disrememberance of her story would symbolize the forgotten stories of those whose stories were never told. And when she speaks about the footprints coming and going, this not only represents the lives of slaves but also the characters in the book. Each character who came into