In Beloved, the characters experience enormous violations of their human rights that create situations that the English language cannot truly capture. The author, Toni Morrison, attempts to communicate the meaning of certain indescribable emotions and actions through catachresis, a literary device in which a writer uses the closest expression possible to describe something that has no precise definition in English (Danner, 32-34). Morrison explains this in his foreword, saying: “To make slavery a personal experience, language must disappear. » (Morrison, Since this struggle has no definition that someone who has never been a slave can understand, Morrison uses catachresis to describe its various aspects. In her use of the phrase "a hot thing" (Morrison, 248), which Morrison derives from understanding Sethe's characteristics, she describes the feeling that arises after the loss of a human identity. This use of catachresis is used to communicate emotion when a character feels like they or those close to them have lost their humanity due to the loss of a specifically human trait. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an original essay The specific phrasing of "a hot thing" (Morrison, 248) comes from the limited definition of Sethe's characteristics. When Sethe worked on the Sweet Home plantation, her understanding of characteristics was limited to the example “one characteristic of summer is heat. A feature is a functionality. A thing that is natural to a thing. (Morrison, 230) Due to Sethe's lack of education, she has difficulty understanding what a characteristic is and she moves on before truly understanding it. Morrison draws on Sethe's experience in that moment to find a phrase that she believes will best communicate the meaning of an indescribable emotion. Morrison chooses this experience to find expression for the emotion, because this is the moment when it becomes clearest to Sethe that she is being treated as if she were an animal. Therefore, the phrase “a hot thing” (Morrison, 248) provides the closest definition of an emotion, which occurs when a person experiences dehumanization in Beloved. This is also one of the moments in the novel where characteristics are linked to emotion. By making Sethe feel like she is being treated like an animal, Morrison connects the emotion to the characteristics of the novel. Sethe fears losing her humanity with the loss of a single characteristic, a fear shared by other characters. Sethe seeks to clarify what a characteristic is, when she overhears her master teaching his nephews to separate his human and animal characteristics, saying, “I told you to put his human characteristics on the left; his animals on the right. (Morrison 228) A characteristic is more than just a visible aspect of a person's appearance as defined by the Oxford English Dictionary. A characteristic is a trait that is an integral part of a person's humanity; therefore, a characteristic is an element of a person's identity. This is the origin of the fear of falling apart. The dehumanized feeling that Sethe feels in this case is not the only moment where it becomes obvious to the characters in Beloved that they are considered animals, but it is the explanation for why certain characters have the feeling that theycould break into pieces at any time. . The characters feel that if they lose their defining characteristic that keeps them human, they will simply become a list of animal characteristics rather than a human being. It becomes clear which characteristics these characters consider uniquely human characteristics. One feature that is considered an integral part of certain characters' humanity is their teeth. Earlier in the novel, Beloved loses a tooth and experiences the fear of no longer being human and simply becoming her animal characteristics. Morrison writes: “Beloved looked at the tooth and thought: This is it. Then come his arm, his hand, a toe. Pieces of her would perhaps fall one at a time, perhaps all at once. , the human characteristic would make her simply become her animal characteristics. After losing her tooth, Beloved fears that as she has no characteristics to maintain her human identity, she will fall back into her visible animalistic features, which she believes she will eventually lose as well. So, for Beloved, losing a tooth means losing what she believes remains human. Another time where teeth represent a distinctly human characteristic is in the list of injustices committed by Sethe during her experiences as a slave. Sethe remembers, among other things, that the plantation owner “[the whites] gave Paul D… iron to eat” (Morrison 222). This quote is significant because of the wording. Rather than literally referring to the bit in Paul D.'s mouth, this quote refers to the iron bit as the iron he was forced to eat. This implies that the iron has darkened his teeth, preventing him from expressing his most human characteristic, in Sethe's eyes. The context of this quote also makes it clear that Sethe is talking about injustices that robbed the people she was close to of their humanity. A second characteristic, which is represented as a defining element of human identity in Beloved, is a person's face. When the characters in Beloved remember Halle, they usually remember her face. When Sethe recalls the same list of unjust things that happened during slavery, she also remembers that "they buttered Halle's face..." (Morrison, 222) Although the master of the plantation didn't literally butter Halle's face, he stole it. of his humanity. After witnessing Sethe's husband Sethe being milked, Halle went crazy, sitting in a butter churn and stirring constantly. Both Paul D. and Sethe remember the way he buttered his face, not the loss of his humanity. These characters believed that Halle's unique feature was her face, so when Halle lost her sanity, and therefore her humanity, the Beloved characters saw her buttery face as no longer representative of her humanity. Another time faces are used to represent a person's identity is when Sethe's mother tells Sethe how to identify her, saying "If something happens to me and you can't tell me say it by my face, you can know me by this mark." Morrison, 72) Although it initially appears that Sethe's mother is telling her that her mark is part of her identity, upon closer examination it becomes clear that Sethe's mother is telling her that if she dies, which will bring about the ultimate doom of humanity, then it can be identified by a mark of its slavery. Specifically, by using the word “identify” (Morrison, 72), it becomes clear that Sethe's mother is talking about how Sethe should know whether or not her mother is the deceased. Since she begins her statement with "if you don'tcan't tell me by my face” (Morrison, 72), it is clear that she considers her face to be an integral part of her human identity. This is an example of a character considering his face to be his defining characteristic and essentially stating that if he is dead, his face is no longer identifiable. Through these examples, it becomes clear that the characters are able to identify either their own distinctly human characteristic, or the distinct characteristic of someone they once loved. However, these characters do not portray the distinctly human character of those they dislike. When Sethe reflects on the injustices that occurred during slavery, she is able to speak specifically to the characteristics that Halle and Paul D have lost. When she talks about her mother, who died before Sethe could get to know her well, and about Sixo, to whom Sethe was not particularly close, she simply lists the things that happened to them, thinking “[white] Sixo crusty; hanged his own mother. (Morrison, 222) Sethe is unable to identify either her mother or Sixo's distinctive characteristic. This conclusion is significant because it explains the selective use of the phrase "a hot thing" (Morrison, 248), used later in the book only in reference to the people the narrator loved and the loss of their human traits. The phrase “a hot thing” (Morrison, 248) is used to represent the emotion the narrator of chapter twenty-two feels when a man he loves dies. The narrator states, “I cannot find the man whose teeth I loved” (Morrison, 249). The specific reference to this man's teeth indicates that the narrator believes that they were his distinctly human characteristic. The next time the phrase is used, it is used after the narrator sees "the little hill of the dead." (Morrison, 249). The reason “a hot thing” (Morrison, 248) is used after this fragment is because she saw her man in that hill of the dead. Although not explicitly stated in the text, she refers to her man as if she is sure he is dead for the remainder of the chapter. Another time, the phrase "a hot thing" (Morrison, 248) represents an undefined emotion, in reference to the loss of a daughter who, according to the narrator, shares his face. When the narrator says, “the woman with my face is in the sea, a warm thing” (Morrison, 249). She experiences the indescribable emotion represented by this sentence for two reasons. First, because she has lost another loved one and she remembers something that reminds her of that loved one's human identity. Second, she believes that she and this girl share a face, saying at the beginning of the chapter "her face is mine" (Morrison, 248). So, not only did the loss of this girl represent the loss of a loved one for the narrator, it also represents the loss of the quality with which the narrator identifies her own humanity. The explicit connection between characteristics and a facet of this emotion was made when Morrison wrote about Beloved's fear of falling apart after losing his own distinct characteristic. It is evident that the narrator of chapter twenty-two believes that she has also lost her own specialness from the phrase "I drop the food and break it into pieces." » (Morrison, 251) In this sentence, the narrator of this chapter has succumbed to becoming a simple list of characteristics and no longer feels human. This is why the narrator no longer feels “a burning thing” (Morrison, 248), until she sees the face, which she believes to be hers, emerging from the water. The fact that the narrator no longer feels "a warm thing" (Morrison, 248) until