The Ghostly Hope: A Study of Contrasts in Toni Morrison's Beloved

ABSTRACT

A close look at Toni Morrison’s novels makes the readers wonder about having so many unexplained riddles. One of these foggy ideas is having several contrastive ideas in her novel Beloved (1987). Some of these ideas would make sense with deep explanations, while others need to have a constructive examination to be scrutinized and then criticized. Using text analysis, this paper traces the contrasting ideas in Morrison’s Beloved and lists them according to their literary significance and relevance to the understanding of the reader. Then it explains how such contrasts interfere and collide with the normal, and for what reasons the author presents them in such a way, are the questions of this paper around which the discussion revolves. This study definitively answers the question regarding the correlation between the contrasting ideas in the novel and the implied messages that the author wants to deliver. It also shows how artistic and creative the author was in presenting these ideas. According to the author, Beloved is not just a story to pass by, but one needs to understand every thread and clue it offers. Accordingly, it is the novel that could provide an insightful understanding of the conditions of subalterns of African-Americans and their trek to survive during stories such as Beloved that lasts for generations.