Only once one has understood oneself can one begin to truly live. In Morrison’s novel, Beloved, she employs a variety of literary techniques to convey her theme that the past is never really dead; rather it lives within everyone it affects. Towards the end of the work, Morrison includes three internal monologues followed by a disjointed entanglement of the three voices. Each reveals crucial and clarifying details about its narrator as well as serves …showed first 75 words of 1782 total…

…showed last 75 words of 1782 total…seem the best example of the deep and lasting penetration of memories and rememories. Tony Morrison wants her readers to realize that life happens in the stream-of-consciousness format of these monologues: our past is never really the past; it only happened before. Therefore, Morrison suggests that the past is beloved, that it is a part of humanity to confront ones past, however painful. Only once one has understood oneself can one begin to truly live.