Toni Morrison's Beloved, centers itself, brilliantly, upon the Platonic dialogue - what is the truth? What is it that we know, what is our memory? What is death? The idea of death and memory, thus the loss of that which makes a person once their soul has departed - a concept that is reinforced at the very beginning of the story when Baby Suggs talks of her sorrow that she can only remember "scraps" of her eight children. Here, death is understood as that which separates the person, that which we remember, from their bodies. Memories provide a way for the soul to 'revisit' the living. They change how we view the now. As the memories of a person are separate from that person, then they, in effect, like the soul, are immortal. The nature of the Ghost in Morrison's book, then, is to confront us with our memories, to show us the changing and shifting nature of the mind and what we know about ourselves. In this novel, we are confronted with a very significant presence, Beloved, who spans generations within the story to link the women from Africa to America together. She is the embodiment of the archetypal memories that link all people with a shared past. It is the purpose of this paper to examine the use of the ghost in Beloved.
