Suggestions for Taking Notes:
1. Per chapter, provide four or five sentences that recap the significant elements of plot. (Yes, I’m asking you to summarize!. Because the narration is fragmented, it’s sometimes difficult to decipher plot upon a first reading. Hence, you will probably have to reread certain sections, paragraphs, sentences to grasp fully the events taking place.
2. Give each chapter a title that best summarizes the theme or content. Be creative!
3. Be prepared to discuss, even write about, the narrative style of Beloved. How would you describe it? How is it different from other works you’ve read? Most importantly, perhaps, why do you think Morrison chooses this kind of narration?
Write down three “how” and “why” questions that you would like to ask the author that would help you better understand the work and its themes.
Beloved—discussion questions
Reading Guide, part A: (up to p. 100, “That’s pretty. Denver. Real pretty.”)
(page numbers refer to the 2004 Vintage edition)
1. Morrison’s 1987 novel is dedicated to “Sixty Million and more.” Explicate this, pointing out why it is the first hint that Beloved will be a “holocaust novel” (Crouch, 40) of American literature.
2. Read the first sentence of the novel out loud. Morrison chose every word of this sentence extremely carefully - interpret it. Look now at the beginnings of parts two and three; how do these 3 beginnings structure the book?
3. The novel beings with an account of an Ohio family disintegrating because their house is haunted by a baby ghost. The reason for the haunting is hinted at in the first of many “rememories” (this term is introduced on p. 43) of debasing oppression (p. 5). What leitmotifs and imagery are introduced in this scene of Sethe prostituting herself to the tombstone engraver? How does it explain the title of the novel?
4. On p. 6 we are told that Sethe tried to remember as little as possible. Why does she nonetheless have ambivalent recollections of “Sweet Home,” the plantation house? What is the “tree” growing on her back (18), which she later tells Paul D about?
5. The recollections set the stage for the arrival of Paul D Garner, one of the ex-slaves from Sweet Home. He exorcises the ghost and begins a love affair with the lonely Sethe. Where does the 18-year-old daughter, Denver, fit into the character constellations?
6. In a complex “rememory” beginning on p. 34, Denver rehearses the story of her birth as she has heard it often from her mother. Describe the role of the white girl Amy in this scene. (Incident continued p. 90-100).
7. In an idyllic moment in the book, the new family of three goes to a carnival together, and on the way home they - or at least their shadows - hold hands (59). This interlude with its promise of future happiness is abruptly ended by the discovery of a mysterious woman at their home. How is her arrival unusual, and how do you account for Sethe’s symbolic reaction to her (voiding unending water)? How are the character constellations changed by her arrival? In what ways does she seem to be otherworldly? On p. 62 the mysterious young woman says her name is “Beloved”; does Sethe realize the implications of this? (Compare this to her insight on 163 and especially on 207).
8. Paul D reveals (p. 80) why Sethe’s husband Halle deserted her. How do you account for Paul’s last glimpse of him sitting by the churn with butter all over his face (85)? And why did Paul have a bit in his mouth (85)? Why can Sethe not appreciate the suffering and punishment these men have gone through (86)?
9. Morrison tells us that she deliberately used color very sparingly in this novel. Why? Point out some instances of it (e.g. p. 4) and try to describe its function.
Reading Guide, part B
(pages 101-195 [2nd half of Part 1] in Vintage edition )
1. The character of Baby Suggs is developed in the chapter beginning on p. 101 (“It was time to lay it all down.”); what is her role in the community and why does she become so embittered? She seems to be a kind of touchstone in the book; does that mean that we are to take her death-bed conclusion (There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” [105]) as a truth at the heart of the book? How do fingers/ touching play a key role in this chapter?
2. Did you understand why as a young girl Denver stopped taking lessons in reading and writing from Lady Jones (119-121) and could not hear anything for two years?
3. Can you explain the symbolism of the turtles at the end of that chapter (p. 122), especially with regard to Beloved’s development?
4. Paul D’s past (125 ff.) is not presented as a “rememory” but rather as a flashback. In what ways were his experiences (and his reaction to them) both similar to and different from Sethe’s? Compare the sense of community the prisoners experience with that of Baby Suggs’s congregation.
5. The cold weather comes at a time of crisis in the “family,” although the snowfall itself (152) seems to mark a new closeness in Sethe’s and Paul D’s relationship. What role(s) do the seasons play in the narrative?
6. Baby Suggs’s thanksgiving party, which started off by the gift of two buckets of beautiful blackberries from Stamp Paid, backfires, alienating the community and indirectly permitting the key incident of the novel to take place--why and how (159-180)? Did Suggs deserve the anger of the community? Why does she have a vision of high-topped shoes?
7. The four white horsemen arrive like the Apocalypse. We see the Incident through their eyes, and they categorize it as evidence of the “cannibal life” that the animal-like blacks “prefer” (177). (Compare Stamp Paid’s untold memory of the Incident [184-5.]) Does Sethe ever tell her version of this event to anyone in the novel? To the reader?
8. On 182 the references to the Miami (Native American tribe) are paired in the reader’s mind with the information about the Cherokee who helped (131-3) Paul D’s chain-gang. Why might Morrison have inserted these vignettes?
9. Stamp Paid once again initiates misfortune when he tells Paul D about the Incident. Paul D cannot understand Sethe’s actions any better than she can appreciate Halle’s reaction to her humiliation at the hands of schoolteacher and his nephews. “Your love is too thick,” Paul D says to Sethe (193); what signals tell you that Morrison seems to agree with his assessment but not with his condemnation of her (“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” 194).
10. Does it seem to you that Morrison is presenting the former slaves more as self-defining “agents of their own humanity” or as “resigned victims of the values of their white enslavers” (quotations from Denard, “Beyond the Bitterness of History: Teaching Beloved,” in McKay and Earle, eds.,1997)?
Reading Guide, part C (parts 2 & 3; ca. last 100 pages)
1. The first chapter of Part Two of the novel contains the symbolic ice-skating adventure. How do you interpret it?
2. Sethe talks to Beloved in her thoughts (236 ff.), now that she is sure Beloved is her long-lost daughter. She reveals that a traumatic moment in her past was her realization that Schoolteacher was observing her “animal characteristics” and teaching them to his nephews (227) - why is this so humiliating for her? How does the image of “fine needles sticking in her scalp” (227) link this experience with the arrival of Schoolteacher and the slavecatcher at 124 Bluestone?
3. Look carefully at Stamp Paid’s often-quoted meditation (234) about the jungle in blacks and whites. Tie this in with the references to blacks as animals (School-teacher’s observations, reactions to Sethe’s act of murder, etc.), the white people’s inhumanity, and Suggs’s sermons.
4. The next four chapters are probably the most difficult in the entire book. The three stream-of-consciousness monologs (Sethe’s, Denver’s, Beloved’s) are followed by a lyrical chapter in which all three voices intermingle. In a famous phrase, Morrison calls them “unspeakable thoughts, unspoken” (235). How are the four chapters linked with the motif of “mine,” which reflects their strong love, their desperate need, and a dangerous desire to possess the other person?
5. Did you locate the “Middle Passage” sections of the novel, where Beloved conflates the trauma of her death with the horrors of the slaveships (248-256). This is generally interpreted as Beloved “rememorying” aspects of her racial heritage. Does it work for you? Does Morrison succeed in writing the “narrative of a civilization” (Todd, 45) in focusing on the specific fates of Sethe and her family?
6. In Part Three the idyllic relationship among the three women at 124 deteriorates as Beloved begins to devour everything, including (in a figurative sense) her mother. (Notice that is Denver who recounts most vividly the reasons for Sethe’s murder of Beloved and what Sethe felt during the deed, 295-6.) Denver finally seeks outside help. Why does the community now come to Sethe’s assistance after shunning her for 18 years? How does the solidarity of the women prevent a different version of the incident (but one which would have had a similar tragic aftermath for S.) from occurring?
7. Do you see the humor of Paul’s interchange with Stamp in the next to the last chapter (310) as therapeutic? Is this what enables him to “put his story next to [Sethe’s]” (322)? How do you understand this? Does this, his statement to Sethe that “’You your best thing, Sethe’” (322), and Denver’s integration into the black community make the book affirmative?
8. Many readers wish that the book had ended before the cryptic last chapter. Can you make sense of it? Maybe it helps to contrast “rememorying” with the “disremembered” on the last page, and to think about Morrison’s interest (late 1980s) in working against the “national amnesia” on the subject of slavery.
9. Is the white world condemned completely in Beloved, as some shocked (white) critics have maintained?
10. What new narrative techniques does Morrison display in her demanding, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel?