earticle

영어

This paper seeks an answer to a few specific questions in reading Toni Morrison’s fifth novel Beloved: how different types of memory are represented, how individuals heal from unmentionable past, how does a community re-member a group that have been dismembered? And lastly, how does storytelling which requires mutual technique of telling and hearing function in the text? Morrison draws various types of memories in Beloved: an individual, vicarious and generational memory represented through Sethe, Paul D, and Denver, and also a collective and social memory which a small fictional community in Cincinnati, Ohio creates. Beloved describes how these fragmented memories are conjoined together as the pieces make parts and the parts become a whole like a patchwork quilt. Although Morrison ironically emphasizes that “it is not a story to pass on” since it is too painful to mention, still, the story needs to be told and listened to. By sharing memories and stories, Morrison presents how to unveil the traumatic past and heal it as she resurrects Margaret Garner’s voice through literature. This is the power of the narrative in which Morrison becomes a shaman author who reveals the dark history of slavery which has been shadowed and forgotten under white national amnesia.