Mahsa Hashemi

Intriguing, sophisticated and complex, Toni Morrison’s Beloved, is a story about individual love, loss and pain, set in the context of a nation’s turbulent and agonizing history. Drawing upon narratology and such seminal discursive features as focalization, characterization, narrative time and representation of characters’ discourse, the present study intends to examine the significance of narrative structure in this multifaceted novel, elucidating the unity and interconnectedness of form and content. It is argued that this unity is implemented in order to accentuate the fluidity of characters’ identity, their alienation, their displacement in time, and the process through which they reconnect with themselves.