We All Have Demons

Life is no picnic. It is a rollercoaster of high highs but also of pretty low lows, which can haunt us well past the moments in which we feel like we are living the worst parts. As the saying goes, many of us carry these "demons" with us throughout life. It is each of our own personal challenges to keep these ghosts at bay, for they may very well overtake us if we don't learn how to cope.

I notice this concept in Toni Morrison's Beloved, which so far details the tension and resentment of a family whose house is plagued by the presence of mother Sethe's dead baby. The baby's ghost frightens and drives out Sethe's two eldest children, sons Buglar and Howard, from the home. The only child remaining in the house is Sethe's brave but equally haunted daughter, Denver. She experiences the burden of emotional ghosts, as she struggles to understand the reason for her own existence and her mother's prolonged sadness after essentially losing three of her four children. She cannot relate to the common past of enslavement shared by her mother and Sethe's mother, Baby Suggs. We, as readers, get a sense of this through the constant changes in narrative perspective and time periodization; in one moment Sethe may be telling a story about her own past, and it may then switch to Denver's memory of hearing stories of Baby Sugg's life.

Denver exists confused and upset by the limits of her ability to understand the slave experience. Sethe and Baby Suggs have lived it, and are haunted by their inability to forget it. Through this style of writing, Morrison reveals that the true demon is not the real or imagined ghost of the baby, but actually each character's own dark past or present.