s that her motives were driven by love, that she intended to kill all four children and herself. When that was unsuccessful, she says, "I put that headstone up I wanted to lay in there with you, put your head on my shoulder and keep you warn, and I would have in Buglar and Howard didn't need me, because my mind was homeless then" (204). Throughout the monologue, Sethe's identity manifests itself in her description of Beloved, and she implies that much of her desire to make Beloved understand derives from her own desire to understand why she grew up motherless. That concept also clarifies Sethe's desperate attempts to salvage what little familial love she can scrape together. In addition, the construction of Sethe's monologue, more abstractly, communicates Morrison's ultimate theme that the past, despite its chronology, is as alive as the memories that preserve it. Though the style is dense, Sethe's feelings towards Beloved come from a compilation of myriad disturbing experiences that could never be reported in any other format.
             Denver's monologue addresses slavery from a second-generation point of view. She herself never lived under slavery, but she has suffered no less from its repe
             ...