The ghost child Beloved represents their return of the repressed past that demand to be worked through and not forgotten. The future was a matter of keeping the past at bay.
Morrison suggests that dwelling on the one's own past, or the collective past of the slaves, can strangle your present as Beloved nearly strangled Sethe in the clearing. For the ending to me it indicated that Sethe is healed and Beloved was put back in her place. After reading the Beloved novel I put myself in there place and many things nevertheless remain misconstrued or buried in the novel these gaps can be read as characteristically postmodern. The subject matter touched at a level deeper than understanding.
The Style is not a tale told from beginning to end. It is a story that is surrounded with levels of the past, from the slave ship to Sweet home, as well as the present. Sometimes the past is told in flashbacks, sometimes in stories, and sometime it's plainly told, as if it were happening in the present. The novel is, in essence, written in pieces and left for the reader to put together. The past with present serves to reinforce the idea that the past is alive in the present, and by giving us fragments of work within the entire story is to make us think more about it. Beloved is meant to be more then a story-it is a history, and it is a life. For an example at one point, Paul D and Sethe exchange flashbacks that meld into one whole feeling, of people. Another point is where the novel switches off between four white people, who show the biased point of view of some men who view slaves as tamed animals. .
The topics of the novel were many but one really sticks and that would be the slavery issue. The slave trade was known for its slave ships. How dirty, crowed they were forced into cellars and to lie for periods of up to twelve weeks. Then all the number of Africans, whom died in the passage between Africa and North America, meant nothing.
