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Fiction conveys the texture of PTSD in ways that evade clinical descriptions.

In "Beloved," Toni Morrison uses allegory and narrative structure to show the ways trauma can disrupt a life.

For many sufferers of PTSD, complicated feelings accompany the prospect of relinquishing the past.

Excellent descriptions of trauma abound, including memoirs, but they are logical and descriptive, constrained by the conventions of straightforward narrative. But trauma itself upends the usual modes of narrative by which we think about our lives: out of sequence and unintegrated, traumatic memories defy the logic that guides our sense of our lives as stories with a past, present, and future. Literary tools such as symbol, allegory, and narrative structure can embody a visceral sense of the ways that trauma can disrupt and diminish a life.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved uses these rhetorical tools to offer a brilliant and accurate account of trauma. The heroine Sethe has suffered multiple, severe beatings and sexual assaults, routine among the many abuses of the enslaved in the pre-Civil War South. But the event that pushes her over the edge is the death of her beloved child, a toddler girl whom she murders to save from slavery. As she later explains to her teenage daughter Denver, “If I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her.” Slavery was a death worse than death.

Beloved checks all the diagnostic boxes for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), as listed in the current edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental........

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