Revisiting Denver as the Narrator

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Now that we’ve finished Beloved, it’s time to revisit my first post about Denver being the primary narrator. Having finished it, the novel obviously isn’t from her perspective, as it’s (mostly) written in third person and captures the perspectives and intimate stories of Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, Baby Suggs, and even Beloved. Beloved is a beautifully complicated novel, and includes numerous intertwined narratives. Each character’s perspective tells a different story, but together they weave together into a stunning depiction of slavery; its horrors, the human experience, and the endurance of family, love, and culture in spite of it.

One of these narratives is Denver’s, and her’s is extremely compelling to me. Her story is one about coming-of-age, and how a child has to reconcile with the past of their parents, how to care for them but also how to live their life. Her birth story is repeated multiple times as one of the big, important events because her birth is symbolic. She is the first black person in her family on the continent to be born into freedom. Her story is dealing with what that means: she never was a slave, and yet her life is fundamentally framed by her mother’s experience of it. Despite the trauma we read about, there is some hope to find in the endurance of Sethe and Paul D, and their moving forward in life. Denver’s birth and her coming-of-age is the driving force, I would say, for this notion of endurance and hope, making her a much more central character in the novel.

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