What is Death in Morrison's Beloved?

Denver -- Death almost doesn't exist.  It is not the death itself, but the symbolism of the person leaving (meaning they've stopped loving/being able to love her) that matters.  For Denver, who has grown up through adolescence with a sibling who is literally a ghost, "leaving" is worse than death.  Her worst experiences have been learning that her brothers are absent and that Baby Suggs is "gone" (145).  To her, Paul D taking her mother away would be worse than killing her mother.  She requires proximity, a display of love.  Without it, she doesn't exist.   She labels death a "skipped meal compared to" the feeling that she is "dissolving into nothing" because she "has no world" if she has to "put up with another leaving, another trick" (145).

Beloved -- Beloved's view of death matches Denver's.  Beloved is incapable of seeing death as finality (she came back to life!), but the fact that murder symbolizes a pushing away out of life, out of proximity, is what matters.  Even though she knows she is literally "beloved," and so the love is not the issue (her mother killed her out of love, not out of hate, and it seems she recognizes this), perhaps she (and Denver?) might almost be more content with slave life with her mother's full attention and proximity than freedom without it.  (The issue is that neither of them understand that slavery means no control over this proximity, over this ability to communicate and love.)

Sethe -- Death is safety, because it is a state past exploitation.  She is content (well...what is the right word...forced? willing? determined?) to try to kill her offspring ("the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful" (192)) to put them somewhere "where they'd be safe" (193) because she "couldn't let...any of em live under schoolteacher" (192).  But, at the same time, she is unsurprised that the past (represented by Beloved's ghost) can come back to haunt, that Beloved could have come back from the dead.  If she truly believes that her children would be safer in death than in life, but she believes that communication between the living and the dead is possible, what is there to keep her from thinking that her children might be equally injured in death than in life?  (see Schoolteacher: further discussion)

Schoolteacher -- Death is unprofitable, so it should be avoided at all costs.  Since it is impossible to exploit someone in death, people are something "you were paid to bring back alive" (174).
          As we said in class today, Sethe understands this perspective, which strangely legitimizes the murder.  If Sethe is willing to trade even mortal injury for exploitation, she apparently values her children's ability for self-respect above their well-being.  Is she successful in allowing them to maintain self-respect?  To be unexploited?  She certainly thinks "it worked" (194).  But her children (except Beloved), and seemingly everyone else, value the community's respect as well as their own self-respect...which is the source of some of the mother/daughter tension between Denver and Sethe.  So, in a sense, this scene is so tough because Sethe exploits her own children, but for their own sake, so that they will not be exploited in a way she doesn't want them to be.

Baby Suggs -- Death is a hateful manifestation of the suffering of slave life that she has resigned herself to and come to expect after having a seventh child taken away from her (163). As a slave mother, she did not expect that her family members (especially Halle) would stay alive: "she had been prepared for [the news of Halle's death] better than she had for his life" (163). Of all the characters, she is perhaps the most veteraned at death (if that's possible), having had to deal with many in her life. So when she encounters Sethe's situation, she reacts with a how-can-I-salvage-this-situation attitude rather than an oh-my-goodness-this-is-horrendous one. At the same time, I believe she cracks under the pressure of this situation because she never expected that someone would willingly inflict death on someone else they loved. Previously, it was only something to be avoided, because it was part of the injustice inflicted by an unjust system, just like taking children away from their mother.

Stamp Paid -- Death is something to be saved from.  He thinks he "saved" Denver from death, so therefore death is bad and should never be desired (208).  In this way, his viewpoint is like that of the slave catchers.  But, through working toward an understanding of postmortem Baby Suggs, he is also the first outside of 124 who begins to try to understand Sethe's perspective that death might be a better option than life in some cases, even if he's not willing to understand that perspective (212).

Paul D -- Death is something that can be obtained by completely ridding oneself of life. Paul D tries to beat the life out of Life, so that he can live in chain-gang Georgia without having to suffer the "flirt" of Life. However, his idea of death also incorporates safety ("only when [Life] was dead would they be safe" (128)), but he is referring to mental, not physical, safety (from "caring and looking forward, remembering and looking back" (128)). Like Sethe, Paul D believes that death is something that doesn't have to last forever. To him, life can come back, after it has "rolled over dead" (129) if enough hope is present.