Review of "Beloved: A Question of Identity"In her essay "Beloved: A Question of Identity", Christina Davis discusses the question of identity from a historical perspective, a textual and an authorial perspective. Looks at the text in relation to the slave narrative, explores how the text itself expresses questions of identity, and describes Morrison's authorship choices and their contribution to identity. His exploration of the theme of identity requires the treatment of self-image, particularly in the context of slavery; and the outward image expressed by naming and other white descriptions of black characters. His organization of information is historically sequential, ordering elements as they occurred rather than in the narrative order of the novel. Davis's introduction attempts to place the novel in the context of a slave narrative. However, it identifies several departures from the traditional form. Morrison creates a narrative that focuses on the individual rather than the collective. The novel favors the perspective of the oppressed over that of the oppressor. Davis identifies two ways in which Morrison realizes this perspective. First, he does not describe the “horrible statistics of slavery” but instead seeks to explore “what it felt like” (151). This reorientation of the theme is achieved by extracting “the individual from the mass of statistics” (151). The second major device is the way Morrison has "shifted the tone of the prose from the third person to the first" (151). Davis acknowledges that, although the novel is not narrated primarily in the first person, the primary perspective is that of Sethe, to whom Morrison gives her voice. The first major division of the ess...... half of the sheet. .....Rison's authorial choices. The first is the characters' "remediation of black history" (155). By giving voice to enslaved characters, Morrison "gives them back their history as human beings" and reminds the reader of that history (155). The second major effect is the fullness of character that results from Morrison's "mastery of the voices through which he speaks" (155). Davis cites the sections of the novel that are told in the first person as particularly effective in producing the identities of Sethe, Beloved, and Denver, the speakers. She identifies the chapter in which all three speak together as “the symbolic culmination of the interaction between the three women and their search for identity” (155). Davis concludes by praising Morrison's authorial ability, as well as I.Works Cited: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, Penguin Books USA Inc, 1988.