Echoes of the Ex-centric: Reconstructing History in Toni Morrison's Beloved

History has long been considered as an objective record of past reality. But the emergence of postmodernism questions everything, including history, through its skeptical lens. Postmodernism believes that the world is perceived in terms of linguistic signs. History, too, is an interpreted version of the past, which means its understanding and perception are always linguistically conditioned. Historiographic metafiction focuses on the constructive process of historical representation. Toni Morrison’s well-acclaimed novel Beloved delves into the atrocity of the institution of slavery. Morrison brings back the buried history of slavery by narrativizing from the perspectives of the fictionalized ex-slaves. Beloved portrays the inhuman experiences of the slave community by actualizing their journey of suffering into the narrative. Beloved advocates for these marginalized slaves, whose echoes of the painful experiences resonate throughout the novel. The incorporation of both historical and fictional elements in these novel calls for a historiographic metafictional study. In Beloved, memories play a dual role of serving as a medium to recover the past and to articulate the unheard voices of the slaves. These memories, from personal to collective, act as micro-narratives that undermine the grand narrative of history from its objective proclamation. Thus, by analyzing this novel within the framework of historiographic metafiction, this paper seeks to shed light on the ex-centric characters from the overshadowed pages of the past, who strive to retain their voices in the present through the novel. Additionally, this paper aims to examine the intricate relationship between remembering and forgetting in reconstructing the historical past.