Perspective in Beloved

As I read the Four Horsemen chapter I realized that perpsective plays a huge role in the novel.

When viewed from the perspective of the slave catcher, recapturing Sethe and her children is just another job. He even reminices about the different strategies that other escaped slaves have used to try to avoid capture as if it is just workplace banter. From the perspective of Schoolteacher it's a financial move, capture the woman who still has 10 good breeding years left and pick up her children as profits. But for Sethe it is the unthinkable. So she does what she thinks must be done in order to keep her children from experiencing the suffering and the horrors that she experienced.

Another example of this perspective is when Paul D. confronts Sethe about this after Stamp Paid shows him the newspaper clipping. Sethe dances around the topic for a while before finally confirming what she did. Paul's reaction is to say "you have two legs, not four," implying that what she did was subhuman, animalistic even. This is another matter of perspective, again, Sethe thought she was saving her children from a lifetime of suffering, but in Paul D's eyes she acted like an animal.

An earlier example of this, is when Sethe overhears Schoolteacher teaching his nephews about characteristics, and how he analyzes Sethe's "human characteristics" along side her "animal characteristics." To Sethe this is the ultimate offense and what drives her to send her children away and make a break for freedom, but for Schoolteacher it's just another lesson about another creature.

 

Memory

In Beloved there is that one passage where Sethe talks about "rememory" and what that means for her and how it affects her, but I think that Toni Morrison does a lot more with memory than that passage suggests. 

The pivotal scene in the story is told through a memory, also most of the traumatic experiences and important parts of the novel are told by Morrison through the memories of different characters such as Paul D. or Sethe, or Stamp Paid. Also Sethe uses memories of different characteristics of her baby to finally realize who Beloved really is. She never asks Beloved and Beloved never mentions it, she just recognizes little things that, when pieced together, finally allow her to understand who Beloved is.

 Another thing that Morrison does by telling her story through the memories of her characters is build suspense because none of the memories/small stories are told sequentially. For example when Morrison is telling the story in the four horsemen chapter though Baby Suggs' memory and Baby Suggs gets this really bad feeling, the reader has no idea what is coming next. By using this technique Morrison is able to make every scene unpredictable.

I'm not sure whether or not I like what Morrison does with the memories. On the one hand, it makes the novel more interesting because every scene is unpredictable and the reader never knows what's coming next. But on the other hand, it makes the book confusing and I'm sometimes having a hard time determining the sequence in which these scenes are occurring.   

The Art of (style) War

Style Wars really deepened my understanding of graffiti and graffiti culture. Before seeing Style Wars, I had seen graffiti but I never really understood it. It was just something that was there pretty to look at but often illegible. I never knew what a deep culture it had and how much of an art form it was. The movie really showed how much of a culture graffiti is and it also explained the process in detail which answered many questions that I always had about graffiti. I never knew that it took so long to paint a piece, I always thought that some artist would go out for like 45 min and spray paint a wall or something, when in reality there is a carefully thought out plan that takes hours to complete.

Many of the adults in the movie seemed to criticize graffiti because it is technically vandalism and they thought it made the trains and walls that graffiti was painted on uglier. In my opinion graffiti is an art form just as much as painting on canvas or music or dance. In fact all of the trains that they showed with paint on them looked more vibrant and alive and were much prettier than the dull white-grey that was their original color. Also when the cars where cleaned they turned an even uglier color of muddy grey that many citizens agreed was worse than the graffiti itself. Vikram and Jack talked about a famous graffiti writer's works being sold for millions of dollars, the fact that graffiti, which is supposedly "ugly vandalism" could sell for the same price of modern "art" should be indication enough that graffiti is art.

Side Note: Did anyone else find it sort of creepy how excited that one guy was about graffiti writers getting caught in razor wire?