Beloved Blog 4 (general thoughts)

The first thing that bothered me was Morrison’s style of writing. There are secrets whispering out of reach in every sentence and it is annoying (to say the least) to a reader to have to try and decipher every single sentence that falls beneath their eyes. As a writer, I do understand the value of keeping secrets in a novel to keep the reader interested, but Morrison uses this method to the extreme. A reader should not be forced to wonder at the meaning of every word in every sentence on every page. That is too much to ask. A reader has the right to understand at least one thread of the main plot without having to question it.

Another problem, which is related to the style, is Morrison’s tone. The tone of the novel is altogether dark and confusing. The plot is broken into fragments that the reader has to try to fit together, and this is very confusing and frustrating at times. On top of that, the fragments are all more or less the same dark color of the haunted past, which makes them like those especially aggravating pieces of a puzzle that are all nearly the same color. Morrison jumps between the present and memories of the past so often that the transitions are not always clear and it is often hard to determine at what time an event is occurring.

The three main characters (leaving Beloved aside for a moment) are intriguing, but they are so diverse in their similarities that it presents another difficulty for me as the reader. That is, they are all dealing with the same basic problem: trying to cope with their pasts while also trying to build a future that they can depend on. Yet while they are all dealing with the same problem, they are dealing with it in different ways and for different reasons. Denver’s reason for trying to cope with the past while trying to find someone she can love and depend on in the future is obviously different from Paul D’s and Sethe’s reasons because Denver was never a slave. Add to these three characters the wild card of Beloved’s character and that is quite another mess the reader has to deal with.