Symbolic Imagery In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison is a famous contemporary American writer. In 1993, she won the Nobel Prize, for her description "in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import", which "gives life to an essential aspect of American reality."Among all the wonderful novels she has written, Beloved is the most famous one. The novel takes an infanticide story as its main thread, and deeply exposes the terrible trauma left by the slavery in the mind of the Black. In this novel, the remarkable use of all kinds of writing techniques and its theme make it a modern classic since 1990's.The present thesis tries to make a thorough analysis on the use of symbolic imagery in the novel. Part 1 seeks to explore the factors underlying Toni Morrison's use of symbolism. Part 2 divides the symbolic images into five categories and makes a further study on them. In part 3, the present thesis focuses its research on the great contribution of the symbolic imagery to the dominant theme of the story.