Saw that coming

Considering that Toni Morrison said that she wanted the reader to be thrown into a foreign-seeming world by reading Beloved, and considering how the beginning of the book did exactly that, I found it oddly predictable that Beloved showed up. The moment I read the line, "She had new skin, lineless and smooth, including the knuckles of her hands," on page 61, I made a guess that was later more or less confirmed when she said her name was Beloved and further confirmed with her conversation with Denver. And I'm willing to bet that even the people who didn't notice it at the above line at least had very strong suspicions when she said her name.

This is interesting to me, because of all the things that should be predictable or that should make sense in this book, a dead two-year-old coming back to life as a 20-year-old seems to be lowest on the list. And, thinking back, the thing that seemed to make the most sense to me back in the beginning was that there was a ghost haunting the house. Everything else was sort of a whirl of memories that were mentioned briefly and never brought up again.

And yet, once Beloved starts asking Sethe all those questions, those memories are brought up again, and everything becomes clearer. It's as though by being a paradox of predictable unpredictability, she's a catalyst for making everything else make sense. She brings things out in the open, and as the confused characters learn more about each other, they begin to heal and become less confused, and we, the readers, understand more about them and about these snippets of memory that they keep mentioning briefly and then suppressing.

But this healing/understanding process continues even when Beloved isn’t asking questions, since conversations about her seem to lead to more memories, such as when Paul D tells Sethe that Halle saw the two boys steal her milk. And there’s the separate storyline of Denver’s birth, which has nothing to do with Beloved’s questions or presence. Of course, this storyline doesn’t cause any understanding between the characters, it only helps the reader, so this is a separate case. When the memories help the characters understand, it’s usually related to Beloved.