"Breaking the Back of Words": Musical Form, Readerly Exclusion, and the Ethics of Hope in Toni Morrison's Beloved

This paper undertakes an analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved , reading music as a structuring logic that operates alongside language, shaping both what the novel represents and how it organizes knowledge, coherence, and the inclusion and exclusion of the reader. This construction of inclusion and exclusion also structures the novel's ethics, offering unimaginable hope as a means of analyzing meaning in Beloved.