She only begins to recover, and this is not shown in the novel but merely implied, when Paul D helps her understand her own importance. He explains to her that "You your best thing, Sethe. You are" (273). Sethe had previously placed all of her own worth on what she had created, her children, and while it was good for her to recognize their worth, and her achievements in raising them, she could not recognize her worth as just herself. Her preoccupation with the past had taken over her present and removed her future entirely, as long as she focused on anything other than her own being she could not plan or live out a future. When her perception changes readers of the novel have hope for the rest of her life, where she may recover and finally overcome her traumatic past. The end of the novel reinforces the idea that preoccupation with powerful past memories is dangerous, concluding that "remembering seemed unwise" (274).


The human mind is shaped and restricted by language itself, one's language imposes certain ideas and concepts and it is nearly impossible to escape from these imbedded models. In J. M. Coetzee's novel In the Heart of the Country the use of language is central to the identity of the main character, Magda. Magda attempts to break the patriarchal system in South Africa, and essentially the core of Afrikaner society, through her attempts to alter her language, and the dreams and stories she creates with that language for herself to inhabit. However, her success in escaping the system in place around her is debatable; Magda succeeds in separating herself from history by isolating herself in the eternal present, and thus from language as well in Coetzee's view, but she fails to do anything to remove or weaken the overarching system.
		Sections 94 through 96 follow Magda's visit to the old schoolhouse on the farm, now their servant's residence. She imagines how the schoolhouse was when in use, and how her father might have attended, or perhaps that she herself attended it. This leads her to muse about possible siblings and relatives for her, in particular one boy named Arthur, whom she will mention again. Magda admits the inconsistencies in her "fairy-tale" and confesses a strong desire to return to "[her] own room" (Coetzee 48). In the first line of section 94 Magda begins by isolating herself in the present, "I close the door." This beginning both traps her in her room, and in the in the present (as the verb "I close" is used in present perfect tense), by trapping herself in the present Magda also confines herself to the "endless middle" of her ongoing story. While she wants nothing more than for her life, her 'story,' to have, "a beginning, a middle, and an end, not the yawning middle without end," she can only escape the patriarchal system around her, imbedded and interwoven into the language as it is, by isolating herself from the past, the future, and from reality itself (42-43). 