Although it being awarded a Pulitzer Prize occurred many years ago, Toni Morrison's Beloved was, for a long time, not a book I had ever read.  I'm very familiar with Morrison's work, having read any number of reviews of it, but had not sat down to read one of the novels all the way through.

    I will say up front that Beloved is not an easy novel to read.  Set in an American South in the years immediately following the end of the Civil War, Beloved paints indelible, and very painful, pictures of lives torn apart by slavery.  Its descriptions are graphic, its emotions are expressed without varnish, and its plot, containing at once natural as well as supernatural elements, complex.  To read through Beloved is to take a harrowing journey through one of the darkest undersides of the so-called American dream.

    Yet Beloved is also a novel of balance, an account of desperate attempts to balance maternal love with what seems to be the lot into which one's child will inevitably fall.  It portrays people caught in a vicious paroxysm of fealty, love, and suffering, people trying valiantly to find their way out of an essentially helpless situation.  A situation in which any decision is fraught with immense heartache and pain.  Beloved forces us to consider very carefully the foundations of our moral inclinations and sensibilities. From where, really, do we derive our notion of the good?  And what does it mean?

    Don't answer this question quickly.