A Figment of the Imagination

Before I begin, I want to say that I appreciated the comments on my last post — they were very interesting to read. I wish I could talk more about those two college subjects this week, but I've used up my one and only college post :( .

It took me until the very end of the movie, The Sixth Sense, to realize (SPOILER ALERT) that Dr. Malcolm Crowe was a ghost in Cole Sear’s mind. Because I’ve watched the movie, I’ve had the sneaking suspicion that something similar might play out in Beloved. In this case, I am referring to Beloved as a possible figment of Sethe’s, Denver’s, and Paul D’s imagination. The major difference from The Sixth Sense that may impede such a theory from becoming true is that more than one character physically interacts with Beloved, meaning it cannot be the creation of a single person’s mind.

My next thought was that Beloved is a creation of 124. After all, Denver referred to 124 as person rather than a house, suggesting that it may have an imagination of its own. Given the supernatural aspect of Beloved, I find it perfectly reasonable to assume that Beloved is an incarnation only observable to people who live in 124, which would account for why Paul D, Sethe, and Denver have interacted with her.

Another idea is that Beloved represents the accumulation of the past and the experiences Sethe. Denver loves her because she is finally getting a part of her mother she never knew. Paul D despises and fears her, perhaps because she sprouted from the time Sethe killed her own child, which Paul D sees as immoral. Sethe sees Beloved as her own child, partly because she is her dead child, but also because she is the past that Sethe cannot escape.

I guess we’ll see if any of these theories are remotely true by the end of the novel.