"Beloved" by Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s bestselling novel Beloved is said to be one of the best books of all time because it brilliantly encapsulates the passion, the horror, and the magic of what African Americans endured during 1800’s America, a time period when slavery was a fashionable institute of United States culture. Although it is the twenty-first century and slavery is often viewed as a tale of a nation’s past, the memory of slavery still plays a fundamental role in the way ethnicities of American society function today. Therefore although it may be difficult to recognize some of the most warped foundations that actually helped establish the United States decades ago; Morrison proves through her story Beloved, the benefits of acknowledging the past in order to be freed from its memories in the future, which ultimately helps one grasp a better understanding of self-identity and culture.
Beloved serves as one of the most profound novels of American Literature because of Morrison’s unique use of literary devices such as diction, fanciful imagery, and remarkable shifting angles of opinion to transform a nightmare of American history into a beautifully written story of growth, love and the magic of the human soul. Truly understanding slave stories can be difficult at times, especially when most people haven’t the slightest idea of what the gravity of life for African Americans was like before the Emancipation Proclamation. Nevertheless, Morrison does a fantastic job of depicting the toils of life in the past, through the eyes of free-slaves recollecting memories of when they were literally worked to the bone, raped, beat and mercilessly killed arbitrarily. Despite the negative connotations that encompass slavery, Morrison provides a novel with an underlining positive tone, using the story of Beloved as a way to embrace the flaw of a nation’s past. Beloved inevitably becomes such a powerful book because not only does it function as a literary movement for African Americans, but also as a memento of what life in the past was like, and how every American (despite race) can appreciate the present due to the previous mistakes of the nation.


By: Rachel V. Tolbert

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