Sethe's frustration is a product of her contradictory reasoning. She views her children as an extension of her life that needed to be protected, at any cost. Sethe's concept of loving and protecting her children becomes synonymous with her killing Beloved and attempting to kill the rest. Sethe can see no wrong here. Placing her children outside the horror of slavery, even if it meant taking their lives, was in her mind a justified act of love, nothing more. Ironically, it is Paul D. who reveals the contradictions that Sethe refuses to see in her own logic: "This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here Sethe didn't know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she had claimed. It scared him"(164). Paul D.'s character suggests that although the killing act might have been committed out of a irrational, hysterical, loving mother's need to "protect" her children, Sethe's "claim" that she was and is justified in those actions can not be accepted. Paul D. recognizes what Sethe can not; her act of supreme love is also an act of insurmountable selfishness. When Paul D. calls into question her thinking, Sethe still refuses to see her own role in what has come to pass: 'What you did was wrong, Sethe.' 'I should have gone on back there? Taken my babies back there?' 'There could have been a way. Some other way.' 'What way?' 'You got two feet, Sethe, not four.' (165) Sethe's problem is rooted in her inability to recognize the boundaries between herself and her children. Paul D. stabs at the heart of this problem by suggesting that Sethe had overstepped her boundaries by killing her child. The concept that Sethe equates her life and self-worth with her connection to her children is most graphically illustrated in her mad ravings to the reincarnation of "Beloved".
