Beloved Reader Response

Overall, I thought Beloved was worth reading. I thought that the story was very slow going and dry throughout almost all of the book. It was pretty hard for me to get into the book, and I often found myself going back and rereading pages. Maybe it is just the fact that summer session is harder to get motivated, but I really thought this book was hard to get into. There was very little action throughout this novel which was one of the main factors that made it hard for me to get into. I also thought that this story was a little hard to follow at times. In some chapters, there seemed to be so many pronouns being used, that I was not sure which character the pronoun was referring to.

However, I did think that there was a lot of great history presented in this book. I learned quite a bit about slavery in the past. It is very sad that slavery even existed, but even sadder about how slaves were treated. They couldn't get married, they couldn't be with their families, which amounted them to being nothing more than property. In the book, they talked about Paul D, Paul A, and Paul F. They were all brothers, but their owners decided to call them by these names instead of by their actual names. Another graphic part was when Paul D had to wear the iron bit. Doing this to someone is completely inhumane. The sad part to me is, the owners of the slaves that were doing these things, did not see anything wrong with what they were doing. I guess it is hard for me to picture slavery nowadays or even think about what it would be like, for that matter.

Does everyone think that Beloved is Sethe's daughter that she killed? That is really what I thought throughout the book. However, I was reading some background on this book on Sparknotes.com, and they suggest that that Beloved could also be the ghost of Sethe's mother? Remember, Sethe's mother did hang herself (If I remember right?), so it could be her coming back as well. I just thought I would bring up this question to see what everyone else thinks. I still do think that Beloved is the ghost of the daughter that Sethe killed.

I am glad that I read this book. It opened my eyes about slavery even more. I would really like to see this movie, now that I have read the book. I also would have liked to have seen the biography presentation prior to reading the novel. I really don't know much about Toni Morrison, so it would have been nice to know some about her background before diving into this novel. While it was a slow and somewhat boring read, I am glad that I read it.

Eric