Beloved was an amazing book, but one of the most important factors that makes it so good was the perspective that the book gave. The book gave a view that is not often written from, and it gives this book so much power. First off, the whole book is based off a true story of a slave mother killing her child. When you first hear that, it sounds twisted, which it is, but upon further analysis of it, you see what really is twisted. This mother killed her child because she didn’t want it to live through slavery. The thought of that is chilling. A mother’s love for her baby is universally seen as one of the greatest, deepest loves, and slavery caused this woman not to abandon her baby, but to kill it. That’s an interesting and scary story, but getting the whole thing from the point of view of the person who did it, that is what is so powerful. Although it is a fictional story, Morrison does an amazing job of opening the readers eyes to the true atrocities that occurred

To see everything from an enslaved person’s perspective made the book what it is. To see their lives, and hear their pain, it really makes a reader want to understand. For me, reading about the bit was very hard. I feel like as I’ve grown, I have seen slavery get progressively worse and worse. What I mean is that when I was younger, it seemed sugarcoated. I think the biggest reason it seemed that way is because of the perspective of the author. Rarely anything we read is from the perspective of a slave, and seeing their fears, hopes, and actions, makes it realer.

One last thing I want to touch on is how perspective changes in the scene where you see that Sethe has killed her baby. The perspective changes to that of the schoolteacher, and his hunting group. When he sees Sethe, with a dead baby, all we get from his POV is that this lady killed her baby. There is no reasoning as to why, or how she felt when it happened. This is just one example of why perspective is so important. We get to see through the eyes of the persecuted, and it tells us a completely different, and real story.