Morrison's Storytelling in Beloved

Toni Morrison crafts stories with tremendous skill and art, and her work in

Beloved ranks with the best. She rules her readers by forcing them to focus on one person

or event then switching at times suddenly and seemingly randomly to another person or

event and capturing their curiosity and attention in the process. Morrison jumps right into

her story without any formal introduction, immediately making the reader pay attention

to names, places, and events. She gives the stories of her characters piece by piece, never

completely satisfying the reader until the end when she wraps just about everything up.

She also goes into detail of her characters' internal conflicts many times so the reader

knows what everyone is thinking. All of her techniques lead to a magnificent story.

Morrison captures the reader's attention instantly by jumping into the story on the

very first page without any hesitation. The very first line projects intensity that startles

the reader: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom." She introduces the reader to five

characters on the first page as well, Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs, Howard, and Buglar, as

well as the setting: a gray and white house at 124 Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, in

1873. Morrison hints at the fact that a baby's ghost lives in the house on the first page as

well, which she confirms two pages later. She announces the characters' fates and how

they reached them; Baby Suggs died slowly in bed pining for color in her life and

Howard and Buglar ran off due to signs of the ghost. In all of the information that she

floods the reader with in the beginning, she leaves much for later. Morrison does not tell

why the baby became a ghost. She tells the relationships between the characters, that

Baby Suggs is the grandmother and Sethe is the mother of Denver, Howard, and Buglar,

but she neglects to mention a father for the children and whether Baby Suggs is Sethe's

mother or mother-in-law. She also does not tell how the characters arrived in 124 since

she tells of a place called Sweet Home from Sethe's memory that is in Kentucky, not

Ohio. She also introduces Paul D, a character with no blood relationship to any of the

other characters from Sweet Home but as with Sethe she does not tell how he came to

Cincinnati, only that it seems to him that he had been walking for eighteen years before

arriving. She does not elaborate much on the topic of Sweet Home other than that while

thinking about it, Sethe's thoughts compare it to Hell. By blitzing the reader with large

amounts of incomplete information, Morrison engages the reader's attention quickly and

successfully.

Morrison constantly directs and redirects the reader's attention throughout the

book. She switches back and forth between one time period and another; sometimes she

changes time within the same chapter or even same paragraph. She also devotes entire

chapters to specific characters, but then follows them up with chapters unrelated to the

previous one. Never does she give a complete account of a character's story all at once or

introduce a character one time never to appear again. She always leaves a little part of a

character's life unsaid, uncertain, or unknown usually for later explanation but sometimes

never cleared up. For example, Morrison brings up that talk of jail brings Paul D back to

Alfred, Georgia, on page 42, but she does not explain why until the chapter beginning on

page 106. In a more extreme instance, Morrison introduces Sixo on page 21, but she

waits to tell the end of his story, which happened before the book's present-time started,

until page 228. Her Faulkner-like use of non-linear passage of time in Beloved constantly

keeps the reader engaged through the final page.

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Finally, Morrison manipulates her readers' attention by unfolding her characters'

thoughts along with the plot. She wrote the book in third person omniscient point-of-

view, which naturally allows the reader inside characters' heads to know what they think,

but Morrison goes into more detail than most writers in her descriptions. One example is

when she writes of a rusty tobacco tin in Paul D's chest instead of a heart that he keeps

his memories in and how Beloved makes "flakes of rust" fall off of it. He fought for years

to keep it closed, but after having sex with Beloved it opens for all of Morrison's readers

to see his struggle of the past and present. She also uses precisely descriptive language

when telling of Sethe's internal conflict over killing her daughter, among other conflicts,

and emphasizes it by using images like the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse when

recounting the scene when she actually kills the girl who becomes Beloved. Morrison

goes the farthest she can to tell of what goes on inside Sethe, Beloved, and Denver's

heads and with their internal conflicts as she devotes four stream-of-consciousness

chapters to them. She protractedly features the internal turmoil of her characters to

engage further the reader and provide focal points for attention throughout the novel.

Morrison directs captures and directs her readers' attentions by including large

amounts of bits of information in the opening pages that she does not elaborate on until

later, explaining everything in the novel in nonconsecutive segments, and providing deep

insights into the characters' internal conflicts. She keeps the book a confusion, similar to

the disoriented lives her characters live, and through it maintains a stranglehold on her

readers' attentions. Her readers always continue reading, at her mercy as to when and

where the questions she makes them ask have answers, if they do at all. Morrison proves

herself a master of her craft in Beloved.

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