The Third Possibility--Reading Beloved

Beloved is often regarded as the masterpiece of Toni Morrsion, the first black woman who won the Nobel Prize in 1993. In this novel, Morrison creates A REALITY marked by its elusiveness and mysteriousness. While analyzing how the reader's horizon of expectations is broken in the process of reading, the thesis puts the focus on the Third Possibility-the unexpected possibility out of the common Western reason-in the issues about death and life, the self and the other, and the real and the fictional. Essentially, the Third Possibility is closely connected with the phenomena of obfuscating the boundaries between the opposites mentioned above, which has been constantly noticed and mentioned in previous researches, but has never been discussed in detail and in one thesis. However, from the angles of African Philosophy, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs, psychoanalysis theories and postmodernism, this thesis deals with this topic in three parts.In the first part, the special existence of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver and Beloved is analyzed through clarifying African understanding about death and living and Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.Then the thesis shifts to the third possibility out of being the self and being the other with the stress on intersubjectivity-the close connection among the three women in 124-trying to analyze whether the women in 124 are three or one.Finally, this thesis addresses the topic about what kind of story the novel is. Isit real or fictional or is there the third possibility? On the one hand, the novel provides the reader with more than enough information about the precise time and place of the main events in the novel, seemingly proving that the story has once happened in history; on the other hand, Beloved, the character, is always the source of fantasy.All in all, the Third Possibility enables the reader to vividly "feel" the unspeakable tribulation burdened by slavery to blacks, thus conveying the message that such history full of the distortion of human nature should be carefully tasted before it passes away with the progress of society. This is Toni Morrison's work, inherently political and definitely beautiful at the same time.