Memory in Beloved by Toni Morrison Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of real or imagined experiences. They provide a structure for creating meaning in one's own life as well as the lives of others. In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of memory's self-imposed prison. He expresses an insatiable obsession with his memories, with the past. Sethe is forced to explore and explain an overwhelming sense of desire, longing, thirst for something beyond herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Although Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of these memories, his will is essentially defined by and tied to Sethe's thoughts, experiences, and emotions. Sethe's struggle is an intensely personal process of self-denial; his identity is complicated, convoluted and almost consumed by his memory. Morrison suggests, at least implicitly, that Sethe's crisis is hardly unique. Rather than a positive or negative trait, memory (and the self-destructive powers contained within it) may be an inevitable part of the human condition. Like Mr. Bodwin who hid his childhood treasures in the courtyard at 124, Sethe attempts to bury her more prized possessions to protect them literally and metaphorically. “White people might make her dirty, all right, but not the best thing about her…the part of her that was clean” (251). Sethe cannot bear to let her children suffer the pain and humiliation she has endured. He would rather live with the memories of his crimes, the memories of what his children might have been like, than entrust his future and theirs to the school teacher. His decision to kill his children and her… middle of paper…, as if he or she were condemned to repeat it for eternity. Memory represents an obstacle to this existence; it is at the same time a barrier and a bridge between individuals. As the novel concludes, memories dissipate and dissolve. They don't linger. The reader gets the feeling that some things should be forgotten or at least ignored. “Remembering seemed imprudent” (274). Perhaps, as in Housekeeping, memory hosts a great paradox: the ability to create a false sense of completeness, the ability to provoke the deepest sense of loss. It is the paradox woven into the nature of memory that drives time forward. “The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will not be consoled” (Housekeeping, 192). Works Cited Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Signet, 1991. Robinson, Marilynne. Cleaning. New York: Bantam Books, 1982.