"The Bluest Eye"by Toni Morrison

the tone is that of a root grade reader, with the reference to Dick and Jane and their pargonnts and with Jane playing with her cat and pass over: "Play, Jane, play" (Morrison 7). The meaning is simple and direct, evocative of a clever American family.

The second divide repeats the graduation exercise without punctuation and runs the lyric poem together as if in a frenzy. The meaning is distorted, seen by the eyes of a person on the edge of sanity, a disturbing image created with the precise same words that created the obviously peaceful and commonplace image of the first paragraph. The third paragraph repeats the same words with no punctuation and with no spaces surrounded by words so that the frenzy reaches hysterical proportions. All universal linguistic meaning is lost in a ragbag of letters, only the jumble itself is symbolic of a society in decay and of an image that was never accurate in the first place being reflected through a mind that is hysterical to believe it through repetition.

This becomes the image that bleeds into the story of the Breedlove family and the mental stultification of Pecola Breedlove, a young black woman who lives in the dominate of a white society that believes the image as it relates to whites and that seems to film that blacks live up to the same image. Color is important in this society, the color of one's skin, and Morrison makes strong use of color throughout this novel, antecedent with the green and white house of Dick and

Quiet as it's kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941. We thought, at the m, that it was because Pecola was having her father's baby that the marigolds did not grow (Morrison 9).

Jane and the personnel casualty dress worn by Jane. Immediately, the Breedlove family is presented as a torment of the image of the American family:

Pecola experiences the most damage from intraracial prejudice. . . at the give of her abusive, negligent parents. We are told that even her mother, Pauline, decided at the time of Pecola's birth that she was an ugly child. . .

Not only does their socioeconomic location as poor blacks set them on the periphery of society, but their perception of themselves as ugly isolates them further, offering evidence of self-disgust (Samuels and Hudson-Weems 13).

Johnson, Diane. "The Bluest Eye." The New York Review of Books (November 10, 1977), 25-27.

Pecola represents a generation or more of children who are abused by their parents, by their friends, by their society, and last by themselves. Pecola's growing madness is the result of all this abuse, attributable to the racism of American society, the effects of slavery even a century later, and the images of beauty by which Americans seem to live and to which more blacks aspire as if achieving that image would remove the onus of being different, of being black, of being hated. This theme is expressed by Morrison in many of her novels and is highlighted in this, her first novel:

This contrasts sharply with Pecola, who is and dark, an evocation of night rather than day. Maureen is not made gambol of by her classmates but is rather sought out by boy and girl alike, and Pecola is jealous of her specifically because of her looks and the effect they ca-ca on others.

The name of the family is deliberately ironic. The Breedloves do not origin love at all but hate. The breeding that does upshot place is incestuous and involves no love at all.

Morrison creates characters who are n
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