Beloved IV

Beloved

Final Response

Annie Kominek

The final chapter, chapter 28, I believe, is the one that captured me the most out of this reading.  We as readers have invested a great deal of time, energy and thought into the reading of this story, and here we are told it is “not a story to pass on” (Morrison 323). We are repeatedly told in this chapter that the story of Beloved, of Sethe, of Paul D and Denver, of Sweet Home, of Sixo and Halle – that it is not a story to be told; it is not a story to be heard, or read, or found. That perhaps sometimes, as Ella and Sethe tend to do with it, the past should remain there, quiet and alone.

Past regrets and sadness tend to have a way to swallow you up; eating you alive until you are nothing but skin, bones and an emptiness inside. This is the way it was with Beloved. She brought everything back. She brought Sethe’s great sadness back to her, swallowing Sethe up, eating her insides.

While never being extremely literal in her writing style, this last chapter goes back to the slightly more ambiguous style of previous chapters.

“Down by the stream in the back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go. They are so familiar. Should a child, an adult place his feet in them, they will fit. Take them out and they disappear again as though nobody ever walked there” (Morrison 324). This passage describes to us the entirety of Beloved’s existence. She was once there, as a child, but someone else snuffed out her existence. She was there again, older, almost an adult, when someone else pushed her away again. The people smother her footprints time and again, child and adult alike, for her footprints were both sizes when she lived, and both sizes when she died. The people around 124 couldn’t remember her, and soon the people within 124 are not sure whether she was ever even there, just like a smothered footprint in the mud of a stream.