This tearjerker is the heartbreaking story of an escaped slave, Sethe, who chooses to kill her children rather than see them captured and sent back into slavery. Years later, the Civil War is over and Sethe is living in Cincinnati, and yikes! A woman who might be her daughter shows up to haunt her.
Here are some questions for you:
(1) As one of the most important literary texts about American slavery, Toni Morrison's book builds on a long tradition of slave narratives, beginning with Oluadah Equiano's The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Oluadah Equiano and including Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave and works of fiction such as Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin and Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. If we examine Morrison's novel from a structuralist perspective, what kinds of themes and motifs can we find in her book that link it to the slave narrative tradition both in fiction and non-fiction?
(2) Beloved is a slave narrative on one level, but it's also been characterized as a postmodern novel and a magical realist novel. How does Beloved relate to these two other fiction sub-genres? Think of the magical elements in Beloved, as well as its disjointed narrative trajectory and its multiple narrators, and consider how these "structures" appear in other magical realist and/or postmodernist works.