Thursday, July 8, 2010
Beloved reader response
This Blog is about the book Beloved. I thought this book was an important piece of literature history. This story had allot of mixed emotions in it. As i was reading this book it was hard to follow what was going on. I could not tell if the things she said were happening or not. I had to go back and skim through the chapters i read. The story took place in Cincinnati Ohio during the slave era. As i was reading the story i could tell this story was trying to show a powerful message to the readers. I knew this because of how much emotion they used. Whenever sethe was in the tool shed and she killed her little kid that meant the slavery era was that horrible that she didn't want to make another human being go through that kind of misery. Also how the white people treated the slaves really made me mad. Reading this book made me feel like i was living in the slave era. I rented the film it helped me understand some of the things that were going on in the book. Some of the parts in the movie i had to skip through because they were way to disturbing and violent too watch. If Hollywood didn't make this book into a movie then it wouldn't have made as much sense. I felt the message this book was trying to send was if you do something you can never take it back. We all make mistakes and wish we never made them but we can't take them back. People can ask for forgiveness if they are truly sorry. It seemed that sethe felt she was being haunted for what she did to her baby and other things that happened in her life. In the end I thought this book was worth reading.
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I like how you said the message was about forgiveness and I agree but I feel like that is only part of it. Like I said in my post I feel that the message is about how the past haunts you. True some things can never be forgiven but this was not just about forgiveness. For example Sethe killed her baby and though in her mind that was the only way for her to save her baby most everyone in the town could not forgive her and would not either. If that alone was what the story was about then I would say that forgiveness was the main message but the books main story line is about how the ghost of the baby or Beloved, aka the baby Sethe killed, haunted and broke down Sethe and her family. Sethe couldn’t escape her past, even if she wanted to because her past came to haunt her. Even when Paul was with her she ended up being haunted by her husband and what he may have seen. In My opinion I think a huge message of the book is that the past is not forgiving. Even in the end Beloved never forgives Sethe she is simply casted out of the house by the town and in the very last chapter Beloved is talking about how everyone has forgotten her and it doesn’t seem to me she is very happy about it. I feel Morrison was trying to tell us that no one came escape the past and what is don is done and you may or may not be forgiven for it.
ReplyDeletei agree with you that beloved was a very diffucult book to read. all of the jumping around made it very confusing. i too had to go back through and skim and sometimes reread entire parts to try to understand what was happing in the story. although this caused me to take more time to read than it normally would have i think that toni morrison many have wanted us to go back to reread to gain better understanding of what she wanted to tell us with the story. i can see how watching the movie would make the book easier to understand. i may have to do that sometime. of course the movie is never as detialed as the book but in this case i think that watching it for unerstanding would definitly pay off.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, in the end the book was wreched. The tale of a past haunting you. Ya, the slave trade and the ear that took place was terrible. THe message in the book was surely that, but what the hell Morrison. Not only did I read the first page about five times, but the whole book was a torture to get through. I got the fact that it was not all true. Beloved was a ghost or something like that, but if you know your house is haunted then kick that braud out. She puts spells on people, then this book is a bad version of Harry Potter. If you wnat to make the horrors of slavery come alive then tell people the stuff that went down after slavery was abolished. Please don't give me a 300 page tale of a pultergeist.
ReplyDeleteRyan, I definitely agree with all that you said in your blog. I think that Morrison put serious thought into every single word she wrote for Beloved. The book was meant to provoke sadness, anger, misery, and even excitement within the reader. This becomes apparent by your reaction that you were "angry" with how the whites treated the slaves and about how you had to skip over some parts of the film because they were too violent or frightening. I think that if a book does not provoke true emotions from the reader, then it is not worth reading at all. Beloved is a novel that tells a terrifying story of a woman who killed her own child, but Morrison is somehow able to make her readers feel sympathy for this woman, because of all the suffering that she had already been through. I really do think that this novel is amazing.
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