Reader Response

 "We study them, we hear them, we even feel them, but we never are them."

This quote says it all when we consider Beloved. Just as we are about to understand something, the scene is gone. Just like Just as Paul D, Sethe, and Denver are about to bond, Beloved walks into their lives. Maybe Morrison writes this way because it conveys just how the characters feel about themselves. With the theme of forbidden knowledge present in the book, it more clearly shows us why we are never able to "become" our characters, because they have also been robbed of that by their white owners. Maybe it is also a technique that is used so that only those who have any inkling of what the characters are going through are able to experience it. Perhaps this insight provided by the reader perfectly sums up what Morrison was trying to convey; the idea that slaves were robbed of their identity. That the black community is not able to understand themselves because their culture has been lost to them. They are not even hybrids, they are people who have been granted the right to be human by Americans who so long ago had robbed them of their culture. I find this to be most insightful. But at the same time, I want to point out that anybody in America except for native Americans has a mixture of cultures. However I still understand the point that African Americans might feel robbed of theirs. 

Lots of comments say that this book is something that you can't put down; a book that provokes much conversation. 

There is nothing to be disagreed with in these comments, and they make up most of them.