Education and Literature

This is Denver which is Sethe's youngest child.  Denver was named after a white woman named Amy Denver.  The reason for this is because Amy is the one who helped Sethe birth Denver.  Denver is the most dynamic character in the novel. She is shy, intelligent, introspective, sensitive, and inclined to spend hours alone in her “emerald closet,” a sylvan space formed by boxwood bushes. Her mother considers Denver a “charmed” child who has miraculously survived, and throughout the book Denver is in close contact with the supernatural.  She is also very educated in the novel.

Beloved’s elusive, complex identity is central to our understanding of the novel.  Beloved is the embodied spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter. Beloved is the age the baby would have been had it lived, and she bears the name printed on the baby’s tombstone. She first appears to Sethe soaking wet, as though newly born, and Sethe has the sensation of her water breaking when she sees her. 

Sethe, is a proud and noble woman.  In the beginning of the novel Sethe ends up killing Beloved.  At the time Beloved did not have a name but on her tombstone she had put Beloved.  The community’s shunning of Sethe and Baby Suggs for thinking too highly of themselves is unfair, the fact that Sethe prefers to steal food from the restaurant where she works rather than wait on line with the rest of the black community shows that she does consider herself different from the rest of the blacks in her neighborhood. Yet, Sethe is not too proud to accept support from others in every instance. Despite her independence (and her distrust of men), she welcomes Paul D and the companionship he offers.