The Bluest Eye Literary Analysis For some being a child is not as simple as just growing up, and for young black people in the 1940’s this cannot be any closer to the truth. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel following the life of Pecola, a young black girl growing up during The Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. In this coming of age story, Pecola experiences the harmful effects of beauty standards, racism, trauma, and rape. Pecola, along with other characters in the novel such as Claudia, Frieda, and Cholly Breedlove, experience a world in which innocence is difficult to maintain and outside forces attempt to cause pain at any given chance. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the character of Pecola and other children to express the
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She finds her own eyes ugly and having blue eyes she believes would help her gain a sense of beauty and importance. Pecola seeks out Soaphead Church, a local “dream interpreter”, or local scammer who claims to have connections to higher powers. She asks him for blue eyes and he hands her a piece of meat that Pecola does not know is poisoned. He tells her that if the dog reacts to the meat then her wish will be granted, but if not then god has refused her wish. Pecola does this but the poison kills the dog, leaving her convinced that she has blue eyes. “The girl jumped. The dog gagged, his mouth chomping the air, and promptly fell down… She was trying not to vomit. The dog fell again, a spasm jerking his body. Then he was quiet.” (176). Pecola faces the most trauma out of anyone in this story from her rape to her damaged family life, her desire to be beautiful, and finally this pivotal situation with the Soaphead Church and his dog. This has distorted her perception of reality. She believes that having blue eyes could somehow fix what has gone wrong in her life. After this she is convinced that she has blue eyes and is able to suppress and overlook her traumatic past. To a degree this seems like a gift but the price she pays for this bravery, confidence, and release is a corrupt, fabricated sense of self worth and an ungrounded grasp of the truth. She only finds solace in her blue …show more content…
The Bluest Eye attempts to show the reader that young people and children are often not nurtured in the ways they should. This results in a loss of personal identity and can lead to terrible effects, as it did with Cholly Breedlove. Morrison unspokenly ushers that children, despite their circumstances, should remain children without growing up too fast and discover the positive and negative truths about this world in their own ways and at the right
She finds her own eyes ugly and having blue eyes she believes would help her gain a sense of beauty and importance. Pecola seeks out Soaphead Church, a local “dream interpreter”, or local scammer who claims to have connections to higher powers. She asks him for blue eyes and he hands her a piece of meat that Pecola does not know is poisoned. He tells her that if the dog reacts to the meat then her wish will be granted, but if not then god has refused her wish. Pecola does this but the poison kills the dog, leaving her convinced that she has blue eyes. “The girl jumped. The dog gagged, his mouth chomping the air, and promptly fell down… She was trying not to vomit. The dog fell again, a spasm jerking his body. Then he was quiet.” (176). Pecola faces the most trauma out of anyone in this story from her rape to her damaged family life, her desire to be beautiful, and finally this pivotal situation with the Soaphead Church and his dog. This has distorted her perception of reality. She believes that having blue eyes could somehow fix what has gone wrong in her life. After this she is convinced that she has blue eyes and is able to suppress and overlook her traumatic past. To a degree this seems like a gift but the price she pays for this bravery, confidence, and release is a corrupt, fabricated sense of self worth and an ungrounded grasp of the truth. She only finds solace in her blue …show more content…
The Bluest Eye attempts to show the reader that young people and children are often not nurtured in the ways they should. This results in a loss of personal identity and can lead to terrible effects, as it did with Cholly Breedlove. Morrison unspokenly ushers that children, despite their circumstances, should remain children without growing up too fast and discover the positive and negative truths about this world in their own ways and at the right