In beloved, the characters use story telling as a means of communicating their ideas, for entertainment, and to convey spirituality. While early on Denver's character is still a mystery and she seems somewhat lost, the one thing we know she is fond of is stories, particularly ones about her mother, as well as the day Denver was born. The book is littered with flashbacks that bring us back and fourth between sweet home and 124. We also learn more and more about the Sweet Home men.
The ghost in beloved and the number 124 seem to have a very strange connection. Not only is the the haunted home Denver and Sethe live in, but it's also the home that Sethe's two first children have left. Buglar and Howard (1 & 2) left and Denver is Sethe's fourth child. This means that the child that died in the house, would be her third child. The home address 124 is a sequence of numbers (1,2,3,4) but 3 is missing, because 3 is the dead baby. With the introduction of the odd new character Beloved, being the title of the book as well, I am beginning to think that Beloved could be a ghost or a reminder of Sethe's deceased child. At the beginning of the novel, we also saw that Denver's only apparent company, was the "ghost" in the house, which is why she had no friends and was always at home. However once Beloved comes along this is now the only person we see her talking to.
Woah, that number pattern thing is insane... And I think Beloved is definitely a ghost. Maybe we are thrown off because she is not represented in a manner we typically associate with ghosts, but she definitely has some suspicious mannerisms and stories of her own that indicate she is inhuman, or some kind of supernatural force.
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