Toni Cade Bambara

“Beloved” is a novel written by Toni Morrison, based on racial hierarchies and representation of the ghost in the novel challenges the racial hierarchies. This novel is based on a ghost who has returned to remind everyone about the past and to disturb the present as it is been successful with the association of ghosts and racial hierarchies. Ghosts are souls and spirits of the dead and they disrupt our logic of the separation of the living from the dead as this why ghosts are uncanny. “Beloved”…

The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison explores many themes that convey the lives of the black slaves. Morrison explores slavery into a greater depth through the main characters by portraying the thoughts and experiences of oppression. The protagonist of the novel Sethe, the mother of Denver and Beloved goes through many tragic events that are not limited to physical beatings and verbal attacks from Schoolteacher that shape Sethe’s characterization in the novel. Morrison uses Sethe to portray the…

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explains the idea of racial self-loathing through the perspective of several characters. Each of these characters experience a form of racism and feeling less valuable than white people; how the characters are presented at the end of the novel result from this experience. Morrison also includes the character’s reactions, and how they handle the situation they’re in. Characters that are more impacted by racism, like Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola, develop a hatred for…

The Bluest Eye and why it needed to be so messed up Toni Morrison is known for her unique style of writing. Her raw and unforgiving style lends itself to speaking about topics that are hard to understand the deep nature of. She has a way of speaking to an audience that few other authors have. In The Bluest Eye she uses this style of writing to convey the harsh reality faced by black girls in the 1940s. Pecola in particular has a miserable life which can only be fully understood through…

Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon is a book in which characters build complicated, interlaced relationships with one another based on their similarities and differences. At first glance, Ruth and Pilate appear to be complete opposites. Morrison describes their differences as, “One black, the other lemony. One corseted, the other buck naked under her dress. One well read but ill traveled. The other had read only a geography book, but had been from one end of the country to another. One wholly…

The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison does a very good job in showing what life was like in slavery for both African Americans and the white men. The story helps readers gain an understanding of the trials and tribulations that occurred, and the effects that it had and still has on African Americans. It has many scenes that are difficult for people in present time to understand, like the way that slaves were treated both mentally and physically. The entirety of the book is fairly unsettling; it…

In Song of Solomon, names have significance. Some of the characters have their names assigned to them at birth while some do not receive them until several years later, either their actual name or just a nickname. Additionally, a last name of a given character can hold significance, and the Dead family is no exception. For every character with the last name Dead, it bears significance as they eventually die or are already dead, literally or figuratively. The first person in the Dead family is…

As children, our parents are parents are everything to us. Our world revolves around them and we need them for everything. We depend on them as we grow. Not only for physical things like food and clothing, but we unknowingly depend on them to provide affection and love as well, which in turn creates the skeleton of our emotional being. The Bluest Eye centers on Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl that wants more than anything to have blue eyes. Sure, she’d like to have lighter skin,…

come into the life of her daughter-in-law, Sethe, in the form of high top shoes that she dislikes. This form of darkness that she senses is Beloved. Beloved was dressed in new clothes including the high top shoes that Baby Suggs disliked so much that Toni Morrison stated it back to back! This usage of foreshadowing is used as preparation for the following darkness that consumes Sethe. Beloved begins to torment Sethe and Denver by withering their own mother away. Eventually Denver is forced to…

various ways: the character relationships between Ruth and her father, Macon Dead and his keys, Milkman and Hagar, Milkman and Guitar, and Corinthians and Porter. Each relationship showed different values of love that one can experience throughout life. Toni Morrison begins Song of Solomon by introducing the Dead family with lost love for each other. Morrison further demonstrates that the love that they had before will never return to its original state because of relationship between the…