- Ah…you thought the book ended with that romantic ending to Sethe and Paul D, huh? But that would just be too easy, wouldn't it?
- So we have another, final chapter, if you can consider it a chapter (it's only a page and a half). It's definitely not typical—what is in this novel?—since it has no real plot.
- But it is clearly about Beloved (and all that/whom she represents).
- Think of it as "Beloved: Where is she now?"And where exactly is she?
- It's hard to say since she has become the stuff of a bad dream everyone has tried to forget. In fact, the way the narrator writes about her, she's almost more like a sad, generic ghost story. She's so forgotten that she doesn't even have a name.
- Plus, the narrator keeps telling us that this is not a story to pass on.
- However, there is the sense that she's still around. Maybe it's in a rustle or a brush along a cheek or a moved picture frame. At the back of 124, in the woods, near the stream, there are also footprints that appear to fit everyone's feet and that disappear once a person leaves.
- But eventually, not just the footprints, but even the water, too—even that disappears from people's minds.
- The only thing left is the weather, as in the change of seasons.
- Oh, and one final word: "Beloved."