In the novel Beloved, by Toni Morrison, the passage that stands out was when the character, Sethe, starts to reflect on events that happen to her in the past. She starts to explain herself using vague details. All her guilt and her pain is starting to grow inside, and it seems as if she cannot take it any longer. While her daughter Denver listens to her statement, she starts to condone her mother and tries to understand her mother’s predicament.
“Some things go. Pass on. Some things just stay. I used to think it was my rememory. You know. Some things you forget. Other things you never do. But it’s not. Places, places are still there. If a house burns down, it’s gone, but the place– the picture of it–stays, and not just in my rememory, but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew, or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.” …Denver picked at her fingernails. “If it’s still there, waiting, that must mean that nothing ever dies.” Sethe looked right in Denver’s face. “Nothing ever does,” she said.
This short passage is important for many reasons. In other words, when someone dies, there are ones that find peace on the other side and there are ones who are left behind still traveling on earth. In the second to third line When Sethe says, “Some things you forget. Other things you never do.” I think Sethe means, there are times when a situation would happen that can be traumatizing that you would want to remember, so you try everything in your power to forget whatever the situation is, as if it never existed in the first place. There are times when things happen and someone wishes to stay connected to the memory and would never forget it, as if just happened recently. Sethe uses an example to explain how something can stay in your mind even if it is gone. When she says “when a house burn down,” meaning that it does not exist anymore as an object, the memory of the house stays intact in her memory. Not only her memory but in the memories of other people that was evolved with the house, they would have their memory of the house. Sethe still thinks about the situation of the time she killed her daughter. The memory still remains with her. It doesn’t matter where she goes or what she does, she remembers what she has done clearly in her mind. When she is there at the place where the situation has happened, she can replay the event happening in her head. As a result, they come to the conclusion that nothing never ever dies, they may live on spiritually or can be reincarnated.
