You are my face; I am you.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is masterful for many reasons, not least of them her control of language. In the aftermath of the big reveal that Sethe murdered the crawling already? girl, language and style begin to shift within the text as the situation begins to deteriorate.

First there is the variant repetition of the lines placing characters in relation to Beloved which begin the four chapters which follow after the various tellings of the murder and the events leading up to it. The first of these is from the perspective of Sethe and begins “Beloved, she my daughter. She mine” (200) Next there is the section from Denver’s perspective which starts “Beloved is my sister” (205) followed by a section from Beloved’s perspective which opens “I am Beloved and she is mine” (210). The final of the four sections also commences with the line “I am Beloved and she is mine” (214). In both cases the “she” is Sethe and all four openings foreshadow the struggle that is to take place between Sethe who lays claim to Beloved, Beloved who in turn lays claim to Sethe, and Denver who does not lay claim to anyone but does accept Beloved as her kin.

The third section, the first of the two starting with Beloved’s perspective, is also stylistically different in that all of the paragraphs in this chapter include long spacing breaks within long fragmented and otherwise unpunctuated thoughts. This gives the writing a broken feel and makes more of a challenge to read as extreme focus is a necessity in order to not lose one’s place within the block of text.

The fourth section contrasts by beginning in a traditional paragraph and then breaking into poetry-like stanzas, with each line consisting of a single short sentence and with the “poem” losing end punctuation halfway through. This gives a feels of quick thoughts and the ambiguous perspective makes it seem like a fast-paced dialogue between the three characters but especially Sethe and Beloved. A key stanza on page 216 reads:  

Beloved

You are my sister

You are my daughter

You are my face; you are me

I have found you again; you have come back to me

You are my Beloved

You are mine

You are mine

You are mine

I found that stanza in particular and the larger four-chapter section overall compelling because of the complexity such breaks from the norm add to the novel as a whole. As a writer I appreciate the difficulty in pulling something of this nature off and respect the richness it adds to the writing as it virtually erases the distance between the text and its audience, making the situation all the more immediate and personal to the reader.