Bordering Fictions: Literature, Narration and The Politics of the Border

“Come on. Just cross” (Morrison 3). Sethe's invitation to Paul D in Toni Morrison's Beloved seems inconsequential. When Paul D arrives at 124 Bluestone Road after years of wandering, he goes through what appears to be an ordinary threshold. He's just going into a house. The novel does not open on a border, a checkpoint, an airport, a detention center or a national boundary, but with this house. A house haunted by the dead. A house saturated with memories of slavery. A house in which the distinctions between past and present, life and death, memory and history, collapse again and again. However, upon entering he encounters “a puddle of red and undulating light” that stops him dry (10).