The Bluest Eye
Toni Morisson's novel The Bluest Eye is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio, in the late 1930s. This family consists of the mother Pauline, the father Cholly, the son Sammy, and the daughter Pecola. The novel's focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with self-hatred. Everyday she encounters racism, not just from white people, but mostly from her own race. In their eyes she is much too dark, and the darkness of her skin somehow implies that she is inferior, and according to everyone else, her skin makes her even "uglier." She feels she can overcome this battle of self-hatred by obtaining blue eyes, but not just any blue. She wants the bluest eye. Morrison is able to use her critical eye to reveal to the reader the evil that is caused by a society that is indoctrinated by the inherent goodness and beauty of whiteness and the ugliness of blackness. She uses many different writing tools to depict how "white" beliefs have dominated American and African American culture. The narrative structure of The Bluest Eye is important in revealing just how pervasive and destructive social racism is. Narration in novel comes from several sources. Much of the narrati
This type of organization suggests that the events described in The Bluest Eye have occurred before, and will occur again. The implication is that the church's promise that if you worship God and pray to Him that everything will be alright is no better than Soaphead's promise to Pecola that she will have blue eyes. The other flower, the dandelion, is important as a metaphor because it represents Pecola's image of herself. The name of the novel, "The Bluest Eye," is meant to get the reader thinking about how much value is placed on blue-eyed little girls. " The implication is that Pecola, like so many other African-Americans, never had a chance to grow and succeed because she lived in a society ("soil") that was inherently racist, and would not nurture her. Morrison unpacks the metaphor throughout the book, and, through Claudia, finally explains it and broadens its scope to all African-Americans on the last page. There are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and one of dandelions. The "Dick and Jane" snippets show just how prevalent and important the images of white perfection are in Pecola's life; Morrison's strange typography illustrates how irrelevant and inappropriate these images actually are. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison tells the story of a little black girl who thinks that if she can live up to the image of the blue-eyed Shirley Temple and Dick and Jane that she will have the perfect life that they have. Instead of conventional chapters and sections, The Bluest Eye is broken up into seasons, fall, winter, spring, and summer. I gave her the blue, blue, two blue eyes," Soaphead says. Pecola passes some dandelions going into Mr.
Common topics in this essay:
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Dick Jane,
Lorain Ohio,
Claudia MacTeer,
Pecola African-Americans,
Soaphead Church,
Shirley Temple,
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Toni Morrison,
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excerpts dick jane,
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Acceptance Essays
