I'm going to go ahead and be very honest - I hate Beloved. It is a very tedious read and it requires so much thinking. I spent three hours the other day reading pages 60 - 146 (not including reading journals). Three hours. That means my average rate was a page every two minutes. Maybe it's just me, but it's taking me ages to analyze everything I read.
Most of the confusion in the book comes from Beloved. I simply can't grasp my mind around the fact that she is a human and a ghost. For example, in the scene when Sethe is at the clearing, she thinks of Baby Suggs caressing her neck and then she suddenly starts feeling like she's being choked. Although Denver accuses Beloved of choking her mother, Beloved denies all this. In my mind, this was very odd because Beloved was able to choke Sethe even though she was sitting next to her (not behind her). It makes it seem like she is half ghost and half human. The whole scene was very supernatural.
It is possible that I misinterpreted that scene, but that was the part where I just got really annoyed with the book. Why is it so difficult to read?!? It's probably a good thing that I am reading these challenging books because I'll have to take a few English classes in college, but it makes me so much more thankful that I am going into engineering. I don't like thinking about such abstract and interpretive texts.
I actually kind of like Beloved. It is confusing but I think it is very well written and the story is interesting. I feel like I would enjoy it more if we did not have to do journals and such. It is a difficult text to analyze and it takes a lot of work to get the true meaning out of Beloved.
ReplyDeleteActually, I do agree. If I didn't have to stop in the middle of a chapter to write my reading journal, I think I would be able to enjoy the book much more. The journals do help me analyze the text more, but I think it's awkward to stop reading (especially when I'm very concentrated)and write.
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