That One Escalator (Sasha)

In Beloved , the central scene of the novel, Sethe’s killing of Beloved herself and her attempt to kill the rest of her children, is first narrated from the perspective of “the men without skin”, Schoolteacher, his nephew, the slave-catcher, and the sheriff. But why? Why change our perspective to that of a character completely isolated from everyone else, who believes our characters to be profoundly inferior and worth only what he can extract from them?   And then, why does this happen again at the end of the novel? Why does Morrison switch again to the perspective of a (very different) white character for the scene of Beloved’s disappearance? In both cases, the radical switch in perspective massively alienates the readers from the characters we have spent the rest of the book with. We are forced to see Schoolteacher’s thoughts from his perspective, forced immediately to understand why he makes the decision to abandon all of the children along with Sethe. This is i...

       Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God has 3 primary community settings: Janie’s hometown, Eatonville, and the Muck. Janie’s independence and self-realization is closely tied to her engagement in these communities, which increases over the course of the novel. In Janie’s hometown, we learn almost nothing about the wider community. We know that Janie was raised in close proximity to the single white family, which we know may have isolated her to some degree from the rest of the town. We also know that a major party was thrown for the town when she and Logan were married. Other than that, however, we know essentially nothing about the community. After her encounter with Taylor, one of only a few named characters in the early chapters, Janie is shipped off to Logan, who lives far away from the rest of the town, and does not interact with his neighbors much if it all. Janie, as we know, quickly runs away with Jody, and settles in Eatonville,...