Compare a character in Beloved with a character in one of the other Essay

Compare a character in Beloved with a character in one of the other texts we have read OR Compare a theme in Beloved with a theme in one of the other texts we h - Essay Example s the fictionality of history, the concept that history can never be more than a collection of stories with varying degrees of accuracy and numerous different perspectives. She demonstrates this fictionality of history through her main character Sethe as well as in the narrative structure, making it clear that no amount of storytelling will ever be able to contain the true horror of those days. During the time of Shakespeare, fiction was deemed to be the appropriate place for explorations into a nation’s history perhaps because of a similar understanding that there is no means of separating individual human perspective from historical events sufficiently to form an actual, factual history, thus recognizing the same concept of a fictionality of history. One author who certainly understood this concept was Miguel de Cervantes as shown in his Don Quixote. Through the various narrative styles employed as well as through the storyline, Cervantes is able to make his point that no hi storical account can be completely free of some fictionalized element. Thus, despite the wide gap of time between the writing of these two novels, both Morrison’s postmodern book Beloved (1988) and Cervantes’ Don Quixote written in the early 1600s struggle to illustrate both the concept of history as well as the inherent fiction that must accompany history. In Beloved, for example, Morrison establishes quickly that she is relating a story that took place in the past, even establishing the date to relate its proximity to the end of slavery: â€Å"For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims† (Morrison, 1988: 3). This establishes the novel’s fictional ghost story element, but only as it could occur in a society such as that which existed in 1873. The story of slavery is told in the bits and pieces that were left, â€Å"in all of Baby’s life, as well as Sethe’s own, men and women were moved around like