Beloved: Novel-Ties Study Guide

Toni Morrison's writing style is like poetry in prose format. It's absolutely beautiful, and I've never read another book like it. It also has some of the downsides of poetry, like being really confusing, but if you can puzzle it out, it has really deep meaning. This book is also an inspiration to me as a young writer because it proves that you don't have to follow the "rules" of writing to be a successful author. There's single paragraphs that run on for pages, and Morrison even wrote an entire chapter without punctuation-yet she won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction! It's definitely an uncomfortable read, one that will make the reader face the horrible things that happened in the past and their consequences, as well as a confusing timeline and confusing sentences. But! If you're anything like me, it 100% pays off.

In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved. A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret--these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe's history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby's death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe's daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by.