Beloved Reader Response

To me, Beloved was an interesting story that was somewhat hard to follow and I was dissatisfied with the ending. I love stories about the supernatural, and I was looking forward to reading this book because it was about a woman who is being haunted by the ghost of her daughter. However, the book became hard for me to follow as it switched between the present time in Cincinnati and the past at Sweet Home. However, the story did get its point across, that slavery tore families and lives apart and drove people to do terrible things to escape it. This is evident when Sethe tries to kill her children in the shed to prevent them from being captured and forced into a life of slavery. This strong emotion helps shed light on how life was for the slaves, and how desperate they were to escape it. The ending of the book was somewhat of a letdown for me. After Beloved just disappears when they are going to exorcise her, I was disappointed because I wanted to know if she really was the embodiment of Beloved's spirit. Nevertheless, the novel closes with the words that "so they forgot her [Beloved], like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep". This phrase sums up the theme of the novel, that slavery is like an unpleasant dream in our country's history that we have forgotten about today because we don't want to remember the pain and suffering that we have caused to an entire race of people.