The use of the word "she" provides a beginning to each sentence structure, used continuously to focus the reader's perspective to the single character.
The repression of the characters within "Beloved" is a key motive of the style that Toni Morrison uses. There is a disorder of the linear narrative, presenting a narrative of fractured individual perspectives, all inexplicably linked through the "black community" and the desire for individuality and freedom. Observing music in context within "Beloved", the reader can observe a tangible connection between the community and the expression of a harmony through that same community. When Sethe is taken to prison, the black community do not sing at her departure: "Was her head a bit too high? Her back a little too straight? Probably. Otherwise the singing would have begun at once" (p. 152). The reader must observe that the singing is an allusion to the community itself, their own emotion and their acceptance of others, a powerful tool to be used to explain the survival of the African-American slaves in a detrimental society. .
David Lawrence writes, ""The people withhold the support that their songs would have bodied forth, their words disdaining to touch the offending flesh. Now, however, the community, led by Ella, tried to sing Sethe back into its embrace." Comparatively, at the climax of the novel, during Beloved's complete domination of Sethe, the community sing together. They represent the "soul" of ancestry and bondage that they must endure together, through the cadence and melody of each woman, "Building voice upon voice until they found it, and when they did it was a wave of sound wide enough to sound deep water and knock the pods off chestnut trees." (p. 161). Morrison creates an essential contrast within the novel's structure, at the two pinnacle extracts within the writing. The community's song is a fundamental representation of Sethe's own repression, and her release from her own bondage of "Beloved", effectively considered to be a repression similar to the slave master: "The bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became.
