The Ending of Toni Morrison\'s Beloved
While the actual value of Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, is debatable, there is no question that the ending that Morrison provides for her work is an acceptable one. Beloved details Morrison's characters' descent into fantasy, and as is often the case in novels, the ending ties up many of the loose ends, and pulls the characters back into reality, with the events of the novel seeming simply, "...like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep"(324). On the other hand, while perhaps fitting and logical, Morrison's ending is not perfect. Morrison's style and storyline up until the ending is far from concrete, dealing with that which is implied, illusory, and symbolized, rather than what is plainly in view; she writes with suggestion rather than description. This pattern, however, is broken in the final chapter of Beloved. The narrator now, in the final chapter, takes a mainly external
A realization that the middle three hundred and twenty pages of a novel are irrelevant, generally speaking, reflects negatively on the author of the work . In comparison to the suggestions of events previously occurring in the novel, such as when Sethe flees with her children, and ". ", an ending which is functional, but lacks depth. and therefore unemotional position, unlike earlier in Morrison's work where the emotions, personalities, and often fractured thoughts of the characters would be included in the narration. While this is technically an acceptable conclusion, it allows the reader to feel that nothing of any importance has come of the characters' struggles throughout the book, as according to Morrison, everything returns to normal, with the possible exception of 124's status as a haunted house. This shift from implied to described jars the reader, and makes the ending slightly unsatisfying. Apparently outside the story, in the final chapter, the narrator blandly reports that, ". they [had] forgotten her like a bad dream.
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