Toni Morrison did a lot a research before she began writing Beloved. When she first started the story she was going to do a piece on "self-murder and the way one can kill and sabotage themselves with the best intentions." During her research she came upon the story of Margaret Gardner, who was a 20 year old slave woman who ran away from Kentucky, When she was found in Ohio she went to a shed and proceeded to kill her children. From this information she created her Character Sethe. For a mother to kill her own children she was saying that she valued their lives so much that she did not want them to go through th pain and suffering of slavery. This act of love was

Toni Morrison uses many different types of symbols to give the story a deeper meaning. Toni Morrison "uses numbers as a way to communicate". Numbers often evoke ideas more readily then words alone. Upon opening the novel the first thing you read is the number "124" (the address of the house where Sethe and her family live). This number combination is probably the most important use of number symbolism in the whole novel. When these three seemingly unimportant numbers are broken down they have a greater meaning. Sethe had three children, the third one was killed, leaving the numbers 1,2 and 4, creating the irony of the home address. In addition to the number symbolism Morrison creates names for the characters that hold a deeper meaning. The man that carried Sethe and her baby across the river's name was "Stamp-Paid" (Beloved,91) His name holds a lot of meaning. He was an African-American who tool runaway slaves to a place where the air was free. He had Paid the price for his freedom, thus his name "Stamp-Paid" Stam

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 687
Approximate Pages = 3 (250 words per page double spaced)