Through her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison challenges the notion that unspeakable truths such as that of slavery should remain unspeakable, not to be passed on to the untainted, blissfully ignorant minds of younger generations. The idea behind this notion is offcourse that those who are spared the passing on of the story of slavery can thus remain protected from the reality of its atrocities – assuming one had not experienced them. However, the last of lines of Morrison's novel actually seem to implicate that perhaps the story of slavery is not one to be overlooked after all, that it is a story that needs to and should be told. For the purposes of this essay I will be discussing how Morrison goes about making the shift from the unspeakable to the speakable, both through her narrative choices and the psychological development of the texts central characters. More specifically, I will be arguing that Morrison primary tool for making this shift is through the psychoanalytic transfer of realistic narrative to the fantastic or uncanny and likewise a shift from symbol and allegory to basic plot level.
             "It was not a story to pass on...It was not a story to pass on.... This is not a story pass on". This obvious shift in the third iteration, from "It" to "This," implicates Morrison's own narrative choices in her novel's anxious engagement with the politics of storytelling. As Angela Simpson suggests in her article Morrison's Beloved, "Pass on," can in this case entail a number of meanings: to transmit; to decline; to die; to walk by (perhaps, even, in the way that someone walks through a crowd while "passing"). The text plays on all of these senses, resisting both the illusion that we can simply walk away from the nation's racial history and the compulsion to repeat that history yet again: Morrison suggests that she has neither forgotten nor perpetuated, unaltered, received versions of slavery's story. This suggestion poses a...