Monday, April 11, 2011
Beloved sct. II
The new, first-person approach definitely introduces a different element to the whole story. Now, we get to see each character's individual motives and reactions to the things we have already observed from the omniscient point of view. The story up until now has been told in a way that gave us choppy glimpses into Sethe's troubling past but now that we have finally heard it spelled out we get to see the specific characters' thoughts. Now that I've seen into Sethe's mind, I think she really is kind of crazy. No doubt it is the result of mistreatment and unimaginable emotional hardship. Sethe has lost touch with humanity and reality, in a sense "dying". She killed her daughter to avoid this "death" for her and to put her somewhere that she would be safe from these horrors. "How if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something that I could not bear to happen to her" (238). This line served as evidence to me that Sethe does not see things the way most people do. She seems to know only love and pain, and sits at opposite extremes on this scale.
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I fully agree that Sethe is a bit demented. Given her history, and Denver's fears, I feel it is safe to say Sethe cannot easily be labled the heroine of the novel. While her shortcomings are excuseable, Denver is the novel's far more sympathetic woman. Sethe has clearly been touched by her past, resulting in her destructive decisions. I also agree that she only knows the polar ends of Love and Pain. But with the abscence of a gradient, Sethe is unable to connect to the world around her.
ReplyDeleteI agree with most of what is said. The reason as to why Denver seems more sane than her mother is because she never had the past that her mother did. She did not experience the same thing. Her mother did try to kill her in order to "save" her but she was too young to remember. Sethe's destructive decisions come from never knowing a safe environment. She lives part of her life in fear of losing her family which leads to her caring too much about them to let them go.
ReplyDeleteSethe is definitely crazy. Even if she has a way of justifying it. Her past is brutal and though it might make you sympathetic towards what she went through, it still doesn't excuse what she did. Her view of the world is slighted, and not exactly aligned with the way I see it, or anybody else does for that matter.
ReplyDeleteThis is really interesting insight into Sethe's point of view. I hadn't had put much thought into Sethe's differentiation between killing her and dying. This may provide insight into the interpretation of death throughout the book, and how Stamp Paid staid that it's hard to keep someone in the ground who died violently. Maybe that's because they were killed, and hadn't died. Died could be seen as a metaphor for freedom, maybe? I dunno, just brain storming in a comment box.
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