To Never Let Go - Personal Reflection

In everyone's life there is a moment that is so dreadful and horrific that it is best to try to push it further and further back into your mind. When traumatized it is very natural to shut off the memory and in order to self-defense suppress the awful emotional experience. Very often is thought that this neglecting and abandoning is the best way to forget. So did Sethe and Paul D. Trying to ignore their past and avoid any confrontations related, they seeked to forget their awful memories. But forgetting is very temporary. It lasts only until the smallest event triggers the memory and then the horrible past is experienced once again sometimes ever so painful as it was.

In Beloved, the past is not only impossible to erase, it cannot be beaten back – both pervasive and intrusive, it lives in the present, and can never be fully banished. When the community as a whole confronts Beloved - the past embodied - they soon forget her "like a bad dream”. Yet, though she is “disremembered and unaccounted for”, she is never dead - “her footprints come and go, come and go” - the marks left by the “unspeakable horror and terror” of slavery can never be truly removed. 

The haunting past is further expressed in the deliberately halting narrative. The narrative is emphasized and echoed by a series of flowing interior monologues, which have often been described as the most poetical passages in the novel. These monologues, each an obvious part of the whole, each accentuating and reflecting the others, are a contrast, in their continuous, effortless, even incessant outpouring, to the fragmented plot. Sethe, Denver and Beloved’s unbroken thoughts and dreams add to the sense of immediacy and poetical lyricism.

The tragic stories of the characters in Beloved reveal to me a lesson in defenses. That you can develop as many defenses as possible, to protect you from fear and loss, but no matter what we are not invincible. We are human and we must allow ourselves to feel and understand each emotion that we might experience.