In Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sethe slits her daughter's throat when the slave runners are upon them, coming for her children. Whether 'tis nobler to put Beloved out of Sethe's misery, or to let the slave drivers sell her like a package of sod – that is the question. Should Sethe have killed her baby? Perhaps not. Sethe slit Beloved's throat because she knew that the cruelty of slavery would torture her third daughter just as it had tortured herself. However, she ended up condemning her daughter to haunting 124 for years. Beloved should not have been killed. Sethe did not have enough time to decide what to do with her children, and had to make an immediate decision.
             Morrison demonstrates slavery's dehumanizing effects by using vivid language to show Sethe reduced to the most basic, animalistic instincts – killing her young to protect them: "Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other." This understanding of Morrison's art makes the implication that a better choice would be not to kill her daughter. Obviously, Morrison wishes for the reader to contemplate this idea by painting such an outstandingly bright picture, and would like the reader to decide that, even though it was not right for Sethe to kill her child, it was her only choice because slavery had damaged her so: "She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time."
             Naturally, some will beg to differ. Other readers will state that Sethe simply loved her daughter, and it was best for Beloved to die than suffer a fate worse than death. However, if one reads the book time and time again, one will realize that Sethe could have made a better choice and saved herself eighteen years of torture from her daughter's ghost if she had been able t...