the effect of Judgment Day on all those whom she encounters," leading the residents of 124 to address "her or his most profound individual anguish, whatever lies at the core of each identity." To Elizabeth House, however, "evidence throughout the book suggests that the girl is not a supernatural being of any kind but simply a young woman who has herself suffered the horrors of slavery." House noted inStudies in American Fiction that Beloved's entry into the family is due to a double case of mistaken identity, caused by "the destruction of family ties brought by slavery, and Beloved, seen as a human being, emphasizes and illuminates these themes." Other reviewers see Beloved as a figure who represents "the spirit of all the women dragged onto slave ships in Africa and also all Black women in America trying to trace their ancestry back to the mother on the ship attached to them," as Deborah Horvitz notes in Studies in American Fiction. According to the critic, Beloved is a stand-in both for Sethe's mother, dragged from her home in Africa, and Sethe's baby girl, emerged from the spirit world. "Beloved's character is both the frame and center of the book, and it is her story—or her desperate struggle to know and experience her own story—that is the pumping heart of the novel," Barbara Schapiro concluded in Contemporary Literature. "Beloved's struggle is Sethe's struggle; it is also Denver's, Paul D.'s, and Baby Suggs's. It is the struggle of all black people in a racist society, Morrison suggests, to claim themselves as subjects in their own narrative."

Another aspect of the novel to come under critical scrutiny has been the circular structure of its narrative. Beloved is told through story and flashback, presenting the past in pieces which the reader has to fit together. This structure is important to the theme of the novel, according to several critics. As Susan Bowers remarked, "the characters' remem-orying in Beloved epitomizes the novel's purpose of conjuring up the spirits and experiences of the past and thus ultimately empowering both characters and readers." "The splintered, piecemeal revelation of the past is one of the technical wonders of Morrison's narrative," Walter Clemons similarly explained in Newsweek. "We gradually understand that this isn't tricky storytelling but the intricate exploration of trauma." By moving "the lurid material of melodrama into the minds of her people, where it gets sited and sorted, lived and relived," Morrison endows it with "the enlarging outlines of myth and trauma, dream and obsession," Ann Snitow noted in Voice Literary Supplement. Eusebio L. Rodrigues likened the narrative structure of Morrison's novel to an "an extended blues performance." As he explained in the Journal of Narrative Technique, "phrases and images will be used over and over again to generate rhythmic meanings; fragments of a story will recur, embedded in other fragments of other stories. A born bard, the narrator, a blueswoman, will cast a spell on her audience so that fragments, phrases, words accelerate and work together to create a mythic tale."

Morrison's work has also been hailed for its ability to re-create the inner lives of people subjected to oppression and brutality, something the author believed was missing from slave narratives of the nineteenth century. Walter Clemons applauded the author's success in achieving this authenticity: "In Beloved, this interior life [of slaves] is re-created with a moving intensity no novelist has even approached before." Barbara Schapiro similarly hailed the novel's psychological realism: "Beloved penetrates, perhaps more deeply than any historical or psychological study could, the unconscious emotional and psychic consequences of slavery. The novel reveals how the condition of enslavement in the external world, particularly the denial of one's status as a human subject, has deep repercussions in the individual's internal world." In portraying more than just the physical trauma of slavery, the novel has a "great bridging capacity ... in the way it opens up the imaginations of those who haven't lived it to the memory of slavery and the experience of carrying that memory in your past," according to Washington Post contributor Amy E. Schwartz. "Written in an anti-minimalist, lyrical style in which biblical myths, folklore, and literary realism overlap, the text is so grounded in historical reality that it could be used to teach American history classes," Horvitz similarly stated. But the true measure of the novel's worth, the critic concluded, is that "as a simultaneously accessible and yet extremely difficult book, Beloved operates so complexly that as soon as one layer of understanding is reached, another, equally as richly textured, emerges to be unravelled."