Understanding The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison, birth name Chloe Anthony Wofford, From Lorain, Ohio. She attended Howard University where she majored in English to pursue her dream in becoming a nobel prize winning novelists. She is best known for her best novels The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love and A Mercy. In my english class I have been reading and researching The Bluest Eye. As I was reading, I became very interested and came up with a few questions I feel that need to be answered that weren’t clear to me: 1) what was going on in Toni Morrison’s life during the time the book was written (what was she experiencing) for her to write this novel? 2) Why did Toni Morrison choose seasons to tell her story, what was the significance? …show more content…
Like the characters in her book, Morrison compared her life at the age of nine to her characters. She wanted to share a part of herself with her readers, with the experience of her family struggling to make ends meet during the great depression, like the family she portrays in her book. She specifically compares herself to one character named Claudia, who listens to her mother sing and grandfather playing the violin. Little details that connects the reader with Morrison through her characters. The Bluest Eye was developed from her childhood memory with a conversation she had with a classmate. “..a conversation she had had in elementary school with a little girl, who longed for blue eyes”. She continued to think about this conversation later on in life and began writing her novel. Like most of her novels she would focus on the struggles of African Americans and black culture. Morrison tries to get her reader to understand what she experienced as a child, with her childhood peers in wanting to have blue eyes, changing their appearance and race just to be accepted. Her goal was to enforce the harm that “internalized” racism can do to even a young girl at the age of nine. She wanted people to know and understand what the world can do to an innocent