Knitting and Knotting the Narrative Thread—Beloved as Postmodern Novel
Beloved weaves a story on a singular frame: interpretation represents an integral part of black cultural and social identity. In Toni Morrison's book, the fictional characters and communitiesÂ—as objects of exploitation in both slave and free-market societiesÂ—transform an essential absence into a powerful presence. A sense of self emerges from experiences of exploitation, marginalization and denial. Analogously, Morrison's narrative, confronting a facelessness the dominant culture in America threatens to impose on black expression, forges out of cultural and social absence a voice and identity. Beloved creates an aesthetic identity by playing against and through the cultural field of postmodernism. At a very basic level, this engagement with postmodernism manifests itself in the aesthetic play of the novel. Throughout, Beloved demonstrates its concern with linguistic expression: the evocation of both oral and written discourses, the shifting from third person narration to omniscient narration to interior monologue, the iteration and reiteration of words and phrases and passages. While this linguistic and narrative variation is evocative of an oral literature that shapes and retraces various tellings of the same story, it also demonstrates a concern (characteristic of experimental twentieth-