The Bluest Eye
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In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells her story through the eyes of an eleven-year-old black girl, Claudia McTeer. The issues raised in the novel address questions bout beauty and its meaning and about the consequences of human actions. The child's point of view illustrates the action, but the book is not entirely in the first-person. Instead, it has inter-chapters in the author's voice which allow the omniscient author to provide commentary and to reveal information not known to the child who narrates the rest of the book. Pecola Breedlove would change her physical characteristics if she could and does change those she can in order to reflect the idea of beauty held by white society. In so doing, she denies her blackness, her heritage, her reality and descends into madness. Her story is presented in terms of family breakdown, self-destruction, and the fusion of sex and racism which Morrison sees as characteristic of American society. The story is about the Breedlove family, living in Lorain, Ohio in the late 1930s, near the end of the Great Depression. Cholly is the father, Pauline the mother, Sammy the son, and Pecola the girl who serves as the center of this novel, the friend of Claudia who is also the subject of greatest interest to Claudia. The girl is reaching the age where she is trying to create an identity for herself, but this is made more difficult by the racist environment in which the girl lives. The irony is that for her, discrimination c
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eminding us of a happy American family. The second paragraph repeats the first without punctuation and runs the words together as if in a frenzy. The meaning is distorted, seen through the eyes of a person on the edge of sanity, a disturbing image created with the precise same words that created the seemingly peaceful and commonplace image of the first paragraph. The third paragraph repeats the same words with no punctuation and with no spaces between words so that the frenzy reaches hysterical proportions.
This is the image that develops into the story of the Breedlove family and the mental deterioration of Pecola Breedlove. Color is important in this society, the color of one's skin, and Morrison makes strong use of color throughout this novel, beginning with the green and white house of Dick and Jane and the red dress worn by Jane. Immediately, the Breedlove family is presented as a distortion of the image of the American family:
Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the time, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow (Morrison 9).
Nothing grows for this family, and the girls hope for green to emerge from the ground--green is l
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1361
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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