Of course, the language of Beloved is poetic. Sometimes it is animated with the timeless force of myth and folklore; at other points it stretches out in longer phrases that circle in on a subject with Faulknerian indirection. Some of my favorite passages take on a sweeping Biblical tone. This final comparison is an apt one. The King James Bible is also poetic, but if you mentioned that to the most devoted fans of the Good Book, they would say that the poetry is a little beside the point.

For the most part — as the dissertations and articles makes clear — Morrison’s readers look to her fiction primarily for the many ways in which it grapples with the issues of race, gender, sexuality and power. Morrison infuses each of these factors, moreover, with several layers of history, not just the antebellum and postbellum time periods in which Beloved is set, but also the earlier history raised in the book’s epigraph “Sixty Million and more,” referring to the black Africans who died in the Middle Passage. This past haunts the story, in a novel in which there are many hauntings, many ghosts hovering on the margins or moving into center stage.

All of these factors are set in play through the character Sethe, the protagonist of Beloved, a black woman of extraordinary power. She is the “one who never looked away,” as her daughter Denver describes her at one point in the book, and Sethe’s fierce independence is the catalyst that sets off key elements in the narrative. Sethe nearly dies in her attempt to escape to freedom from the Kentucky plantation incongruously named Sweet Home, and join other members of her family in Ohio. The plot hinges on decisions she feels compelled to make, above all on how much she is willing to sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also to prevent her children from falling under the yoke of forced servitude.

Morrison’s narrative is enriched by the roundabout way in which she unfolds this tale. The novelist once described to an interviewer her fascination with the “moments of withheld, partial or disinformation” in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, and to some extent her storytelling here is similarly indirect. The central tragedy of Beloved is hinted at almost from the novel’s start, but only in the sketchiest manner. Gradually Morrison circles in on the key elements of her plot, as a vulture circles on its prey, and with a tension that is heightened by the non-linear structure of her account.