Beloved, Memories

Hey bloggers, here's another article about memory...remember?
Through chapter nine the novel Beloved highlights the dangers of the past. Each character is affected by their past and each ones past and memories are impacting their future. In this blog we will explore Sethe and issues she has with the past. Up until this point Sethe had been avoiding the past by keeping her mind away from her memories. By the time Paul D. and Beloved came her house she could avoid it no longer and she began to tell about certain memories. She remembered Baby Suggs' sermon and wanted to be back there. As she walked to the spot the sermon was held, she started to remember things about Baby Suggs that she had kept bottled up inside her. For example, "Sethe blamed herself for Baby Suggs' collapse." Remembering the past brought guilt upon Sethe. Normally she tried to avoid the past to avoid the guilt, but in order to come to terms with herself, she had to remember the guilt. Along the way "The old path was a track now..." This is a symbol showing that sometimes things in the past grow stronger than they were as they age. If memories are avoided, they can too become stronger as time goes on. Finally, Sethe decides to remember Halle and imagines his "unmistakably caressing fingers" which later turn into Baby Suggs' fingers moving "harder...around...her windpipe" joking Sethe. Although Denver beleived Beloved choked Sethe, memories lead to imagination which can seem a bit too real. Once imagination gets out of hand, a person can mentally go insane. So what does all this say about memory? To avoid it? To embrace it? Sethe was trying to avoid it for so many years that it was too much to handle to embrace it all at once. The novel shows that we along with Sethe need to gradually remember things and slowly become one with our past self and current self so we can move on to have a strong future self.   

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