A Literary Analysis Of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye; A Literary Analysis

In a society dominated by white supremacy, racial oppression, and segregation between divergent races, a myriad of people tend to solely centralize the issues of white privilege rather than addressing the alternative problems associated with this type of society. Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye”, published in 1970, provides an alternate perception of the problem that broaches the issues, and consequences of internalized racism. This is what will primarily be discussed in the analysis. The storyline follows the life of Pecola Breedlove, a young, black girl who resides in Ohio in the 1940s, and her plethoric obsession with white beauty standards, predominantly, blue eyes. The way Morrison constructs the book is utterly intriguing, but due to the peculiar disposition, the novel can also be regarded as obscure, and enigmatic. The story transitions through a stream of different point of views, the prevailing one being Claudia MacTeer’s, a young, inquisitive,

The more “ugly” incidents she is subjected to, the more extreme and abundant do her desires evolve to be. The climax is when Pecola is raped by the antagonist of the novel, her own father, Cholly Breedlove. Eventually, she loses her sanity and reaches out to Soaphead to ask for blue eyes. Disgusted with the molestation, people find another reason to despise Pecola and to ignore her. Thereupon, Pecola becomes delusional and surmises that people ignore her because they are jealous of her new blue eyes; “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off” (p. 193). She consequently creates an imaginary friend (p. 191) to talk to as a defence mechanism to deal with the pain of being raped, and neglected by her own