Toni Morrison (1931- ) can be regarded as one of America’s leading writers. When the Swedish Academy awarded Morrison the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, she was described as one "who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." The assessment captures two important trajectories of the now vast body of criticism on Morrison’s works. One emphasis is on Morrison’s unusually poetic language, figuration and use of a diverse range of mythologies. The next part of the quotation characterizes another general strand in criticism, which focuses on Morrison’s attention to race and the socio-historical context of Afro-American experience. Although the phrase "American reality" does not clearly specify the Afro-American community, it does gesture the context of American social and political life which shapes the Afro-American culture and identity. It draws attention to Morrison’s status as an Afro-American writer and her expressed desire to give voice to black experience in America. In their preface to Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present, Gates and Appiah drew together these two strands of criticism: "Morrison’s greatest capacities as a writer are her ability to create a densely lyrical narrative texture that is instantly recognizable as her own and to make the particularity of the Afro-American ’experience’ the basis for a representation of humanity tout court." Beloved (1987) is the novel that demonstrates most obviously Morrison’s concern to bear witness to the forgotten or erased past of Afro-Americans. The present thesis is an attempt to. explore Morrison’s success in speaking out the unthinkable and unspeakable black experience in America mainly from the perspectives of narration and representation in Beloved.This present thesis consists of four chapters plus an "Introduction" and a "Conclusion.""Introduction" demonstrates Morrison’s major concerns of race and representation and how she manages to present the unspeakable life of the slaves. In her essays, lectures, novels and interviews, Morrison has always been concerned with the problem of race, the erasure of the past and the need to reclaim it. Understanding that Afro-Americans have not wanted to dwell on the horrors of the past, Morrison is also aware of the need to witness it. She emphasizes a necessity for remembering the horror, especially a necessity for remembering it in a digestible and bearable manner. In bearing witness to the black life, Morrison distrusts the historical record of slavery. Her attempt is to allow readers to re-experience the effect in relation to slavery and to bring to consciousness what has been repressed through a fragmented and discontinuous narration and imaginative representation of the trauma. After giving asuggestive frame, the third part offers an overview of the whole paper.Chapter One, "Toni Morrison: Her life and Literary Career," serves as a general study on Morrison’s education, her teaching career and her major works. This explains the influence of both Afro-American culture and Western literary conventions on Morrison.Chapter Two, "Beloved: A Brief Introduction," firsts shows how Morrison was inspired to create such an amazing novel and to explore the nature of slavery. As Beloved is narrated by fragments and is composed of flashbacks, memories and nightmares, the present thesis constructs a basic outline of the action in the story and in the meantime, offers a character map to make the relationships among characters clear. An examination of the themes is presented finally to display how Morrison distills universal quality out of the specific problems black people face in a given time.Chapter Three, "Circling the Subject: Morrison’s Success in Narration," demonstrates Morrison’s power in narrating Sethe’s crime of murdering her daughter. This chapter is divided into three sections to discuss Morrison’s narrative strategies in this novel. The first section retraces Afro-American heritage at work in Beloved.