Peter's Blog

The end of Part 1 of Beloved  reveals a rather shocking moment in Sethe's (and Beloved's) history. Sethe is caught in the process of killing off her children to save them from a life of slavery. I find it interesting that this scene, unlike the other books we've read this year, greys the morality of both black and white characters. In Native Son , we root for Bigger as the protagonist as he resists the antagonists: Jon, the court, etc. In Invisible Man , the narrator faces the evils of multiple organizations that try to use him. However, in this part of Beloved , Morrison leads us to question if Sethe is completely good, and the four horsemen are completely bad. Up to this point, we've seen Sethe's struggles as she escapes Safe Home, which painted her as the protagonist struggling against slavery, an evil practice. Here, though, as she tries to murder her children, we question her judgement. Even if her intentions were good, was this horrifying scene really nece...

Countee Cullen's "Thoughts in a Zoo" is basically one huge analogy, relating the racism between blacks and whites with zookeepers keeping animals trapped in a zoo. Oddly though, in his poem, the conflict doesn't seem as one-sided as the white/black conflict was. Right off the bat, Cullen starts with "They in their traps, and we in ours". Are both sides equally trapped? Zookeepers are definitely less trapped than their animals... A little further down, he refers to a "gaunt eagle whose raw pinions stain the bars", some animals that "delve down like the mole", and snakes, who watch with a "changeless slothful eye". These seem to refer to different types of reactions from blacks' oppressed state. The eagle has been fighting futilely for freedom, the mole has been hiding (like Invisible Man's narrator), and some have been simply watching, neither actively accepting or denying the oppression. But once more at the end, h...