Memories In Beloved, By Toni Morrison

Memories impact a person in several different ways either emotionally or psychologically. Those memories help structure a person’s way of acting, thinking, and way of communicating with others. Important or special events are usually the ones that stay in your mind and never go away. At times these events help represent a person and their state of growth throughout their lives. As Sethe states in page 43, “Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay”.
Memories are things, people, or events that are remembered/recollected from the past. In the book Beloved by Toni Morrison, the story takes place back and forth during Sethe’s life. Sethe is a mother of four and a former slave. As a slave and a mother she encountered situations in which extreme
In the first chapter of the book, the author describes scenarios in which the baby’s ghost had made presence. The book starts off with “124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old-as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar): as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)”. The ghost in the house serves as a reminder for Sethe, a reminder in regards to the decision she had to make for her family’s safety. As a mother, the fact that she killed her own daughter is something she cannot go back and change, nor forget. She has to learn to cope with that for her other daughter’s good, she needs to move on from the past in order to be able to provide and take care of Denver. It was a hard decision that changed her life forever, but it's a decision she had to make since there were not many options as a slave. As a slave her only option was to run away, but