Toni Morrison's Beloved As A Neo-slave Narrative

Toni Morrison is a famous American writer who owned her Nobel Prize in 1993 for her "visionary force and poetic import". Among the wonderful novels she had written, Beloved is the most widely read and is regarded as the milestone in American literature history. Morrison successfully uses neo-slave narrative in Beloved. Neo-slave narrative inherits and rewrites the traditional slave narrative in its unique representation of the thematic concerns of the novel. This paper analyzes Beloved from the perspectives of the neo-slave narrative, exploring the way Morrison adapts the conventions of the traditonal genre in her representation of black sujects and themes.Neo-slave narratives draw from and improve upon slave narratives in terms of both form and theme. As can be seen from the structure and the thematic emphasis of the whole novel, Toni Morrison successfully uses the technique of neo-slave narrative in Beloved. Arguably, Beloved as a typical neo-slave narrative work deserves our close study. The use of neo-slave narrative in Beloved enables Morrison to articulate the themes of the novel more clearly and vividly. More than trying to help readers to realize the cruel essence of slavery, Morrison uses this kind of narrative to arouse the racial and historical memory of black people, the implication being that only by correctly facing their past and by rooting in their own tradition and culture can black people find their social identity and obtain freedom from the fullest sense of the word.