Each character in Beloved is a former slave with a painful and scaring past. Sethe, a main character, killed her first-born daughter to protect her from slavery and has been haunted by the ghost of her first born for 18 years. Sethe lives in this haunted house with her daughter Denver, who is effected by her mother's choice to forget the past. Later on Paul D, an old friend of Sethe, visits Sethe, which brings up some old memories. Beloved discusses America's relationship with slavery and the effects that slavery had on people. Even after slaves' had obtained their freedom, the characters were still imprisoned by their haunting memories. The author believes that success is obtained by, understanding and acknowledging the past rather than suppressing it, which leads to an unstable identity and loss of cultural identity, obtains success. .
Sethe and Paul D choose to repress their past. For Sethe, especially, the absences of these memories don't allow her to construct a stable identity. When Sethe was a slave, two white boys attacked her. They raped her and stole her breast milk, which prevented her from feeding her daughter. She repressed the memory of the attack, causing her to never fully move on with her life. Everyday Sethe tries to forget it even happened, "As for the rest, she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe " (Morrison 6). .
Later in the novel a character, Beloved, is introduced. Beloved is seen as the spirit of Sethe's dead daughter. Beloved represents the past returned to haunt the present and her presence is enabling while at the same time is destructive. Memories begin to surface that help Sethe understand her past and herself. For example, in Chapter 6, Beloved gets Sethe to talk about the death of her mother, something she has tried to forget. Sethe remembers the African language spoken by her mother revealing her culture and establishing part of her identity.
