Eusebio L. Rodrigues

Beloved is a triumph of storytelling. Toni Morrison fuses
arts that belong to black oral folk tradition with strategies that are
sophisticatedly modern in order to create the blues mode in fic-
tion, and tell a tale thick in texture and richly complex in mean-
ing. The reader has to be a hearer too. For the printed words
leap into sound to enter a consciousness that has to suspend dis-
belief willingly and become that of a child again, open to magic
and wonder.

"124 was spiteful": thus the narrative shock tactics begin. ¹
Here is no fairy tale opening but an entrance (124 is not a num-
ber but a house as the last sentence of the first paragraph will
confirm) into a real unreal world. Toni Morrison's narrator -- it
is a woman's voice, deep, daring, folkwise -- has full faith in her
listeners (curious males have gathered around her) and in their
ability to absorb multiple meanings. She plunges into medias
res and begins her tale with the arrival of Paul D.

Paul's arrival sets the story in motion. Outraged by the
spiteful persecution of a "haunt" that resents his sudden irrup-
tion into a house it has taken possession of, Paul attacks it and
drives it out. The incident has a tremendous impact -- on Paul,
on Sethe, who has resigned herself to a certain way of life, on
Denver, who feels deprived of the only companion she ever
had, and especially on the listener, who is bewildered, utterly
disoriented. For he is flung into a dark fictional world without
any bearings or explanations. He has to be patient and wait for
light to filter in through cracks in the thick darkness. Exhala-
tions from the dim past arise -- a baby is furious at having its
throat cut, a grandmother's name is Baby Suggs, a baby is born in
1855, Sethe's milk is taken -- but they lack meaning and cannot,

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