(2 of 2)
As it shuttles back and forth in time, Morrison's narrative slowly unfolds the rationale behind Sethe's violent act. What seems incomprehensible gradually takes on an awful inevitability. Having risked everything to escape servitude and degradation and having tasted nearly a month of freedom, Sethe saw four men on horseback approaching to reclaim her and her children: "And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them." If she had had her way at that mad moment, Sethe would have killed all her children and then herself.
Morrison's supple prose makes such desperation palpable. Beloved is full of vivid images, freshly rendered. Here is the runaway slave facing the Ohio River, which stands between her and liberation: "Sethe was looking at one mile of dark water, which would have to be split with one oar in a useless boat against a current dedicated to the Mississippi hundreds of miles away." Here are Sethe, Denver and Beloved enjoying a rare moment of pleasurable abandon on a frozen lake: "Their skirts flew like wings and their skin turned pewter in the cold and dying light."
The flesh-and-blood presence of Beloved roils the novel's intense, realistic surface. This young woman may not actually be Sethe's reincarnated daughter, but no other explanation of her identity is provided. Her symbolic significance is confusing; she seems to represent both Sethe's guilt and redemption. And Morrison's attempt to make this strange figure come to life strains unsuccessfully toward the rhapsodic: "I will never leave you again/ Don't ever leave me again/ You will never leave me again."
In the end, the implausibilities in Beloved may matter less than the fact that Sethe believes them. Uneducated, her heritage and culture reduced to a few shreds of memory, she sees no distinction between the supernatural and the equally surreal facts of her own life. Morrison's heroine is hard to understand, and to forget.