This abandonment causes him to feel a sense of indifference towards the rest of the world - he feels “free” because he no longer cares about how he feels or what he does, or how his actions affect other people.Ībandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. Cholly has experienced true loneliness and humiliation - both of his parents abandoned him (his mother left him in a junk heap by the railroad when he was only four days old). The fact that Toni Morrison could make Cholly Breedlove a somewhat sympathetic character might be a testament to how amazing a job she did in constructing his narrative, because Cholly is, arguably, the worst character in this story. She is angry with whatever standard dictates that they are pretty but she is somehow not. While other girls and adults fawn over them, Claudia breaks and tears them apart, in an effort to “examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable.” This translated into a disdain for Black people’s idealization of white people, and eventually, a disdain for white people themselves.Īdults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs-all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured.ĭespite the self-love and shamelessness she feels, Claudia admits that she is envious of the attention that the white-skinned/light-skinned girls get.
Shirley Temple) and the blue-eyed baby dolls she receives as Christmas gifts. We can see Claudia’s disillusionment with these beauty standards by the way she reacts to young white actresses that everyone seems to adore (e.g. The novel’s primary narrator, Claudia is cognizant, even at a young age, of the glorification of white beauty standards. I won’t go over every single character discussed in this novel, but there are about four main characters that Toni Morrison uses to get her point across: Worst of all, Morrison shows how some of the most vulnerable people in such a society end up getting the shortest end of the stick. The Bluest Eye observes how racism ingrained into a society morphs into a collective inferiority complex and a constant aspiration towards whiteness these internalizations affect potentially every single aspect of a person’s life, and have harmful collateral affects on the people around them. An excellently-written novel, but also a heart-wrenching experience. So I should start by saying this: The Bluest Eye is arguably one of the saddest books I’ve ever read. My Biggest Takeaways: How Racism Is Internalized With its vivid evocation of the fear and loneliness at the heart of a child’s yearning, and the tragedy of its fulfillment, The Bluest Eye remains one of Toni Morrison’s most powerful, unforgettable novels - and a significant work of American fiction. In the the autumn of 1941, the year the marigolds in the Breedloves’ garden do not bloom, Pecola’s life does change - in painful, devastating ways.
Pecola prays for her eyes to turn blue so that she will be as beautiful and beloved as all the blond, blue-eyed children in America. Set in the author’s girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio, it tells the story of black, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove. The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s first novel, a book heralded for its richness of language and boldness of vision.
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