Only once one has understood oneself can one begin to truly live. In Morrison's novel, Beloved, she employs a variety of literary techniques to convey her theme that the past is never really dead; rather it lives within everyone it affects. Towards the end of the work, Morrison includes three internal monologues followed by a disjointed entanglement of the three voices. Each reveals crucial and clarifying details about its narrator as well as serves to support Morrison's ultimate theme-the past is a part of us. The monologues themselves take the an interior form, a style which sacrifices sequence for profundity, to convey the idea that chronology is negligible when determining the significance of memories.
             Sethe narrates the first monologue, hastily justifying her reasons for killing Beloved and fervently expressing her jubilation that she has returned. The account takes the form of interior monologue as Sethe recounts numerous anecdotes from her colorful past. She first expresses her permanent emotional scars from having her milk stolen by "the men with no skin" or white men with numerous (and anachronistic) references to nursing and milk. This abstraction is later revisited in Denver's monologue. "Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else-and the one time I did it was took from me-they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my baby" (200). Sethe continues in desperation as she tries to blame Paul D for preventing her from recognizing Beloved as soon as she arrived at 124 and then trails off into a painful description of Sweet Home and her experiences under Schoolteacher. She regretfully remembers the stories like that of her brutal beating-when they "opened her back" while she was pregnant with Denver-to convey to Beloved how necessary it was for her to save her from the horrors of slavery. She maintain...