The past and the present are jumbled together for Sethe, who does succeed in cutting the throat of her baby daughter before the slavecatchers can stop her. The same is true for the other characters in the story. They've been in chain gangs, raped, seen all of their children sold away. These people can't stop reliving the horrors they've seen. The fluid, sometimes confusing jumps between past and present underscore this: the words read like the jumbled thoughts of humans who have suffered severe trauma in a time when post-traumatic stress disorder wasn't acknowledged and therapists didn't exist.