Pecola Breedlove's 'The Bluest Eye'

Common Core Research Paper
Analysis on The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye is a story that describes the life of a young African American girl named Pecola Breedlove whom was wrapped up in a life of poverty and hardship growing up and made to believe that she was ugly by the early 1940’s American society. Pecola Breedlove was a young girl growing up black and very poor in the early 1940s. During her life she was tormented and teased ugly by almost everyone that was a part of her life or whom she encountered. All of the verbal and physical abuse she endured caused her to live in a world of imagination where she day dreamed and fantasized about being a beautiful white girl with blue eye. She felt that beauty and being white would alleviate her
Native Americans were the original Americans inhabiting North America whereas African Americans were uprooted and kidnapped and brought in chains from their home land as slaves. Native Americans were stereotyped as savages and their lands were seized by the English colonizers through warfare. With that being said, it is easy to connect the experiences of this group to those of the characters in The Bluest Eye as racism comes in different form. Most of the characters in The Bluest Eye allowed or were forced by society to believe and accept things and how they looked in the mirror as just a pigment of their imagination due to color of their skin and their roots origin. The same can be said but only in a different format that the Native Americans were being treated unequal and forced to migrate off their own land because of being considered inferior. The Bluest Eye explores the lingering effects of racism by exploring and commenting on black self-hatred. Nearly all of the main characters in The Bluest Eye whom were African American were consumed with the constant culturally-imposed notions of white beauty, cleanliness, and sanitation to the point where they have disengaged with themselves and have a terrible tendency to subconsciously act out their feelings of self-loathing on other members of the black community. In presenting the various modes of escape and retreat into empty notions of whiteness, the author demonstrates how this is a damaging way to work through so many years of being hopeless and objectified. In the narrator’s description of how the Breedlove family was ugly, it is stated in one of the important quotes from “The Bluest Eye”, “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that is came from conviction, their conviction. It was as