The Bold but Unsuccessful Beloved Toni Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, a vividly unconventional family saga, is set in Ohio in the mid-1880s. At that time, slavery had been destroyed by the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation, and subsequent constitutional amendments, although the daily reality for freed slaves continued to be a matter of perpetual struggle, not only with segregation and the insults it entailed , but also with the curse of memory. Morrison's heroine, Sethe, is literally haunted by the little girl she killed in an act of terrible mercy, when threatened with recapture after her escape. Though robbed of friends by the poltergeist, she lives in the dazed calm of the survivor until one of her fellow Kentucky slaves shows up on her doorstep after eighteen years. Paul D Garner, with his special quality of empathy, is "the kind of man who can walk into a house and make women cry". In the first hours of his visit he clears Sethe's house of the poltergeist, makes love to Sethe, and greatly antagonizes her teenage daughter, Denver, not only because of his interest in her mother, but because the poltergeist was her only companion . The ghost, however, wastes little time in making a more solid manifestation, as a runaway young woman whom Sethe takes refuge in and by whom she ends up being dominated. She abandons her job to be with Beloved and while the ghost girl thrives, she and Denver are reduced to near starvation. It is only when Denver dares to emerge from her isolation and cry out for help from the rest of her black community that Beloved can be sent back to her grave and Sethe and Paul D. reunited. Intertwined with this rather obvious symbol... .. middle of paper ...... in the description of his escape from the tomb - the hold of a slave ship seems fleetingly invoked - the details remain too vague to have the same force and effect of those harrowing physical journeys undertaken by flesh-and-blood characters in other parts of the novel. Being a family saga, "Beloved" is a bit unbalanced and suffers from gaps. The reader is left with several unanswered questions: what happened to Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, who although often invoked do not appear on stage? What will happen to Denver, whose new life begins at the end of the novel? In an interview with the Guardian, Morrison spoke of his reluctance to conclude the story, and it certainly seems there is more to say. It may be that Beloved's story turns out to be the painful, moving, but relatively minor part of a much larger narrative..