Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit.

The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade.

He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver's contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival.

While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past, including the sexual violence inflicted upon him and the other men while in a chain gang.

One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe by showing Paul D a newspaper clipping of an article about a fugitive woman who killed her child.

Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs' privilege and horror at Sethe killing her two-year-old daughter.

Baby Suggs dealt with this by refusing to become close with her children and remembering what she could of them, but Sethe tried to hold onto them and fight for them, to the point of killing them so they could be free.

To understand Paul D's perception of manhood, Morrison deliberately inserts his half-formed words and thoughts, to provide the audience a taste of what is going on inside his mind.

Many Black men, like Paul D, struggled to find their meaning in their society and achieving their goals because of the "disabilities" that constrained them to a certain part of the social hierarchy.

In Beloved, Stamp Paid observes Paul D sitting on the base of the church steps "… liquor bottle in hand, stripped of the very maleness that enables him to caress and love the wounded Sethe…" (132).

Throughout the novel, Sethe believes that the person claiming to be Beloved is her daughter that she killed 18 years prior - a scenario that shows how [fractured] family relationships are used to display the mental strife the protagonist faces.

Sethe's decision to kill her own child, Beloved, is thoroughly scorned by the community, despite her fear that Schoolteacher is coming to take her family back into slavery.

When he visits Sethe near the end of the novel, Paul D reminisces about “Her tenderness about his neck jewelry — its three wands, like attentive baby rattlers, curving two feet into the air.

Paul D's intimate experiences with the iron bit have changed him forever, stripping him of his masculinity and contributing to a deep mental storm tormenting him from within.

Feeling trapped by her isolation at 124 Bluestone Road, Denver is challenged by the concept of leaving Sethe and Beloved behind, needing the courage to set foot beyond the house to seek the aid of the community she was once a part of.

Overcoming her preconceptions of the outside community allows Denver to surpass Morrison's threshold of heroism, rescuing Sethe from the suppressive grip of the past through Beloved.

Morrison then compares the voices of the praying woman to a wave of sound that could even “knock the pods off chestnut trees,” highlighting the complete extent of power a united community truly holds.

In the wake of this spiritually pure experience, Sethe “tremble[s] like the baptized,” showcasing how she has been, to some extent, cleansed of the taint of Beloved by Denver's courageous actions.

[19] Through her characterization of both Sethe and Denver as unlikely heroes capable of surpassing adversities in order to help their loved ones escape the haunting of their past, Morrison may be emphasizing that heroism is defined not by supernatural powers or acts of unparalleled valor, but by the courageous intent to overcome the assertive preconceptions of society in order to ensure the greater good and positively influence on others in the process.

As also mentioned, a young woman enslaved by a White man nearby had escaped, and Beloved recounts stories of past slaves, including Sethe's mother.

[22] Amy Denver is a young white girl who finds Sethe desperately trying to make her way to safety after her escape from Sweet Home, trying to get to Boston herself.

[25] The New York Times reported that the first 'bench by the road' was dedicated on July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the place of entry for some 40% of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States.

[27] The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes—his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity.

Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in The New York Times Book Review on January 24, 1988.

Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to Beloved, "60 million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade, which estimate that approximately half of each ship's "cargo" perished in transit to America.

Susan Bowers places Morrison in a "long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing" that looks back in time, "unveiling" the horrors of the past in order to "transform" them.

Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how primal scenes in Morrison's novels are "an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory" and "rememory".

The conflicts at work here are ideological, as well as critical; they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African-American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation.

With the help of like-minded teachers and an outpouring from Eastern's alumni, the ban was soon lifted, and the book continues to be taught at the high school today.

When McAuliffe ran again for the governor's office in 2021, a major event in the election was his statement during a debate that, "Yeah, I stopped the bill that—I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach."