Beloved

The third time is not a charm. This was my least favorite book we have read so far, I found it really hard to get into and finish. It’s not that the book wasn’t sending a good message but the delivery was painful. Even though there was a multitude of events that should have aroused the reader, to get them to engage and want to keep reading, it never evoked that response in me. I feel like Morrison had most or all the pieces to make a good novel but they just didn’t work together and get executed correctly to make an exciting read. After saying that, the book did deliver a good message about how slavery was, from a slave’s perspective. I think that is a key factor to the books appeal, the little that it held for me, because a lot of the literature from the time isn’t written from that perspective, it was written by a white man. Beloved, along with our class discussion, delves into this concept that they couldn’t read or write. For today’s reader it reminds you what was written about slavery during that time is not consistent with the actual events from that period as seen through the eyes of a slave and this book allows the reader to take a journey through the slaves recollections and the emotions they felt and the actions they had to take just to survive. It’s hard to comprehend those emotions in today’s society. In class it seemed that almost everyone was able to justify Sethe killing her children to escape slavery. It was an act of mercy, she was saving them from a lifestyle that destroyed her and killing them was the only way she saw for them to have a better life than she had… in her experience no life was better than living, when the only outcome is to be treated so inhumanly and enslaved. While I found it hard to read, I was still able feel for the characters, the story evoked a response out of me and I consider that a success, but regardless I never want to read it again.