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, textual, and authorial perspective. She compares the text to the narrative of slavery, explores how the text itself expresses questions of identity, and describes Morrison's choices in authorship and their contribution to identity. His exploration of the theme of identity calls upon 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. Its organization of information is historically sequential, ordering elements as they occur rather than in the narrative order of the novel. Davis's introduction seeks to place the novel in the context of a slave narrative. However, it identifies several deviations 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, she does not describe the “horrific statistics of slavery,” but rather seeks to explore “what it felt like” (151). This reorientation of the subject is obtained by removing “the individual from the mass of statistics” (151). The second major device is the way in which Morrison “shifted the tone of the prose from the third person to the first” (151). Davis acknowledges that although the novel is not told primarily in the first person, the primary perspective is that of Sethe, to whom Morrison has given her own voice. .....Rison's authorial choices. The first is the characters’ “reappropriation of black history” (155). By giving voice to enslaved characters, Morrison “gives them back their own history as human beings” while reminding the reader of that history (155). The second major effect is the fullness of character that results from “mastery of the voices through which Morrison speaks” (155). Davis cites the sections of the novel that are spoken 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 peak of the interaction between the three women and their quest for identity" (155). Davis ends by praising Morrison's talent as an author, as does I. Works Cited: Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, Penguin Books USA Inc., 1988.