Their names are the no-names of non-people and are as alive as jazz with their quiddity and idiosyncrasy." .
The past and the present are not separate within "Beloved"; they appear as a single entity, without any means of distinction. Judith Thurman writes of Toni Morrison's literary style, "She treats the past as if it were one of the luminous old scenes painted on dark glass and she breaks the glass, and recomposes it in disjointed and puzzling modern form." Using the effective style of streams of consciousness, the characters Beloved, Sethe and Denver display a culmination of thought and perspective. Similarly, jazz is introspective by nature; it presents to the listener a culmination of improvised input from the creators that will often consist of more than one player. The streams of consciousness almost seem beyond the prose style of the novel, rather they present to us a poetic state that provide the rhythm and conscious of music, rather than literature. The convictions of the three characters are powerful and emotive, yet also composed of their own ideologies that form the final statement of "I am Beloved and she is mine" (p. 214). Like an improvised jazz piece, there is no past and present, only individual perspectives that combine to create one harmonic statement. .
Toni Morrison, as in a jazz band, provides the "double bass" of the novel through the omnipresent narrator, keeping a continuous rhythm and providing effective continuity throughout the novel. However, such continuity also provides lyrical, rhythmic prose, comparative to a melodious or harmonic structure. "She can feel her thickness thinning, dissolving into nothing. She grabs the hair at her temples to get enough to uproot it and halt the melting for a while," followed by, "She doesn't move to open the door because there is no world out there." (p. 123). This narrative style contains short, repetitive sentences, creating a rhythmic rhetoric if read and repeated.
