Thomas Hardy’s statement “a story must be exceptional enough to justify its telling; it must have something more unusual to relate than the ordinary experience of every average man and woman.” epitomizes what makes a story valuable and important to read. Everyone’s lives are full intertwining stories; however, it is stories that are not about everyday occurrences that can lead one to see things in a new light and that are worthy of telling. The novels Beloved by Toni Morrison and Native Son by Richard Wright are exceptional stories; they’re worthy of reading and worthy of telling. Beloved is a story of acute hardships experienced by characters who refused to give up. The novel deals with slavery, oppression, and freedom. However, this novel is not a typical story of slavery and its effects on former slaves. Woven into the novel are themes of family values, perseverance, making decisions, destruction of identity, and the supernatural. Morrison leads the reader into intricate relationships as common and heartwarming as mother-daughter ties and as rare and dark as relationships between the deceased and the living. Throughout the novel Morrison uses her extremely descriptive writing style to take you through the main character Sethe’s past as a slave and her upward climb with her daughter to freedom. The supernatural element Morrison incorporates in the novel sets it apart from other books on slavery. She uses the ghost of Beloved, the daughter Sethe killed in order to keep her from slavery, to show her readers the value of life, love, loss, and family ties. This novel is extraordinary and is definitely “exceptional to justify its telling”. Richard Wright’s Native Son also examines the effects of oppression of black people during the Jim Crow era. Wright leads the reader into the main character Bigger’s mind as he implodes after years of oppression and commits a gruesome murder of a white girl. However, this book is