Preview

The Bluest Eye

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
1321 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye

The major characters in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison were Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, Claudia MacTeer, and Frieda MacTeer. Pecola Breedlove is an eleven-year-old black girl around whom the story revolves. Her innermost desire is to have the "bluest" eyes so that others will view her as pretty in the end that desire is what finishes her, she believes that God gives her blue eyes causing her insanity. She doesn't have many friends other than Claudia and Frieda. Throughout the book we see how Pecola is picked on by other children her age and then later on abused by Cholly, her own father. Her mother doesn't care for her either her actions toward Pecola are not without contempt. Cholly Breedlove is Pecola's drunken father. He has never known a loving family; his father deserted him and his mother who then left him to die in a garbage can. His great aunt saves him and raises him until her death, which occurred when Cholly was only thirteen or fourteen years old. Cholly himself deserts his family, not physically but he is always in a drunken state and doesn't provide the family with the barest necessities. Cholly dies alone in a warehouse. Claudia MacTeer is the main narrator in the story. She is about nine years old when they story takes place, she is remembering the story. Claudia is black and doesn't see anything wrong with that. She isn't like the other girls who think it would be better if she was white, she doesn't buy into that idea, she destroys the white dolls that she receives for Christmas. Claudia has learned from her mother how to be a strong black female and express her opinion in a white dominated society. Frieda is a lot like her sister and had the same morals imposed on her by her mother. Frieda is about ten years old when the story takes place.

The book The Bluest Eye is not told in chronological order and skips from the story to a look into the past of certain characters. There are two

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye, written in 1970, is novel by Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel and was written while she was teaching at Howard University. The Bluest Eye tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, during the hard times following the Great Depression. In this novel, Toni Morrison addresses a timeless problem of white racial dominance in the United States and points to the impact it has on the life of black females growing up in the 1930's.…

    • 1004 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Bluest Eye

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages

    At the end of chapter 8 in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the reader is reminded of a graphic scene that was mentioned on the first page of the book between a father and his daughter. In this chapter, Cholly comes home very drunk and rapes his daughter, Pecola. While almost all of Morrison’s readers cannot understand, at the beginning of the book, how a man could impregnate his own daughter, they later start to grasp at why Cholly could do such a thing because of his past. Tragically, Cholly is capable of raping his own daughter because of the madness and affection that is built up inside of him.…

    • 451 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye, a fiction novel that shows the story of Pecola Breedlove. Pecola, an eleven year old black girl lives a nightmare at the heart of her yearning in this time of her life. She moves with Claudia Macteer, who is also a black girl. During the time they are together we can see differences and similarities in both of the children and their families.…

    • 415 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sonny's Blues

    • 861 Words
    • 4 Pages

    “Sonny’s Blues” is set in post-World War II New York, in the midst of an important cultural and political revolution that permanently changed the country. Artists from all over the world had made New York a new cultural capital, establishing Greenwich Village, where Sonny briefly lives. A diverse array of artists , including the painter Jackson Pollack, musician Charlie Parker, and writer Jack Kerouac, all converged in New York around this time. These artists learned and borrowed from one another. In “Sonny Blue’s,” Sonny wants to move past the traditional conventions of music, as did many postwar artists. At the same time that the art scene in New York was exploding, thousands of African American soldiers were returning home from the war and heading north toward communities like Harlem, where, instead of finding new job opportunities and equal rights, they found newly constructed housing projects and vast urban slums. Sonny and his brother both serve in the war, and each returns to find a radically different life in America.…

    • 861 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye is a novel by Toni Morrison that takes place at the end of the Great Depression in Ohio. In the novel, the MacTeer family first takes in a young boarder named Pecola Breedlove after her father Cholly has attempted to burn down the family home, but she is soon reunited with her own family despite their hardships. The MacTeer family are essential to the novel because one of the young daughters, Frieda, seems to suffer from a much less severe racism than most other characters, going as far as to destroy a white doll she is given. Cholly drinks, and Cholly and Pecola’s mother Pauline are physically abusive towards each other, leading her brother Sammy to run away from the home.…

    • 658 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye is a complex novel written by Toni Morrison, an African American literary theorist. Morrison evokes a society still plagued by the premise of slavery and the exposes this mode of white inferiority through The Bluest Eye. “Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe”, Morrison endows these last couple of sentences with a lyrical quality that makes the readers truly understand the depth of Cholly’s character and the “freeness” he experiences. Morrison initially introduces Cholly Breedlove as the antagonist, a drunk and very abusive father; any man who would beat his wife, set his house on fire and rape his daughter couldn’t…

    • 1214 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    To begin, "The Bluest Eye" is Toni Morrison's first novel. This novel tells a story of an African American girl's desire for the bluest eyes, which is the symbol for her of what it means to feel beautiful and accepted in society (American). In the novel, women suffer from the racial oppression, but they also suffer from violation and harsh actions brought to them by men (LitCharts). Male oppression is told all throughout the story, but the theme of women and feminity with the actions of male oppression over the women reaches its horrible climax when one…

    • 675 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    Overall, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a terrific novel. Many of the characters in this novel, especially the young black girls, experience discrimination,…

    • 921 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Better Essays

    The theme of the story, “The Bluest Eye” written by Toni Morrison, demonstrates the connection between the self-esteem of African-American people (beauty and ugliness), racism and hate. The reason why this theme is discussed was because, we can go back to the origins of African-Americans, it relates to the African diaspora, Jim Crow era, and how people negatively look at blacks today in society, and white supremacy destroyed black imaginary. But before this goes on furthermore, the audience needs to understand the importance of the dominant society which strongly removed the identity of African-American. Claudia and Maureen play perfect roles during the story. They show…

    • 1060 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Bluest Eye is a novel written by the famous author Toni Morrison. Toni Morrison whoms real name is Chole Anthony Wofford was born in 1931 in Loraihn, Ohio. She was the second of four childern in a black working class family. Morrison grew up in a integrated neighborhood and did not fully realize racial divisions until she was a teenager. She admits that as a child she was the only black and the only one who could read. She always had an interest in literature and even took Latin in high school. She graduated from Lorain High School with honors in 1949. Morrison furthered her education and her strong desire for literature at Howard University. She majored in English and graduated from Howard in 1953. Not yet satisfied with her education Morrison decided to also attend Cornell University. She taught English at both Howard and Texas Southern University. After returning to Howard to teach English Morrison met her future husband Harold Morrison. They got married in 1958 and had their first son in 1961. Morrison first novel was The Bluest Eye which was published in 1970. It was about a young African female who believes her life would be perfect if she had blue eyes. Her next novel was Sula which was published in 1973 and explores the good and evil through the friendship of two women who grew up together. Sula was nominated for the American Book Award. Her next work Song of Solomon became the first work by an African American author to be a featured selection in the book of the month club since Native Son by Richard Wright. Other works include Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, Paradise, Love and many others. Morrison has won many famous awards during her writing carrer. Her novel Beloved won New York State Governor's Arts National Book Award nomination and National Book Critics Circle Award nomination. Morrison biggest accomplishment though has to ber her Nobel Prize for Literature in 19993. She became the eighth woman and the first African-American to win the prize. She is…

    • 353 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Real Cholly Breedlove

    • 900 Words
    • 3 Pages

    In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, one of the main characters, Cholly Breedlove, can be examined through a Freudian psychoanalytic lens, as he struggles with things like the structure of his personality and the Oedipal complex. Cholly is clearly a troubled man and throughout the story he experiences difficulty in trying to find a balance between his id and superego. Cholly also struggles with the Oedipal complex, raping his daughter, Pecola. This action ties in with his id, in that he acts impulsively to fulfill his wants. Cholly Breedlove, a main character from Morrison’s novel, can be examined using Freudian psychoanalysis as he struggles to maintain his ego and as he struggles with the Oedipal complex, raping his daughter Pecola.…

    • 900 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, Claudia Macteer is depicted as the polar opposite of the novel's main protagonist, Pecola Breedlove. Whilst Pecola is surrounded by constantly fighting parents and is even victimized by one of her parents, Claudia was able to grow up in a stable household with loving parents that support both of their children, Claudia and Frieda. Claudia also has a very strong demeanor; she often takes action in many of the plots throughout the novel. Pecola, on the other hand, acts very child-like in some events in the novel and is very frail and closed in. In this novel, Morrison inserted a debate in which she never intended to write in the pages for us, as the readers, to figure out: a Nature vs Nurture…

    • 941 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Although Claudia and Frieda are embarrassed and hurt for Pecola, their sorrow is intensified by the fact that none of the adults seem to share the same feelings of grief and their hopefulness tries to heal their disjointed society. In the passage Claudia begins to describe how she can see the baby, the living human that everyone else wanted dead. The baby that is still in the womb, she pictures the baby, in a dark place this could symbolize death of the baby later. She paints a picture for the reader saying that the baby’s hair like great O’s of wool as in sheep leading us to think that the baby might be a Jesus figure. She describes the baby’s eyes as clean, pure because it hasn’t yet seen the evil of the world. The flared nose, as if the baby is mad or out of breathe again symbolizes death. She says kissing-thick lips, shining a light on the more sexual side making it seem like thats all your lips should be used for. She concludes by saying “the living, breathing silk of black skin”, to express that this baby is living, it is a human, it is taking a breath just like everyone else. Silk is an expensive fabric, something of worth just like this baby’s life. “No synthetic yellow bangs suspended over marble-blue eyes, no pinched nose and bowline mouth.” Claudia goes on to describe the baby as a doll, saying that they are nothing alike, dolls are fake in fact worse they are “synthetic”, and they are far from perfect, they have pinched noses, pinched towards the sky like a snooty white girl. But not like this baby, Claudia felt a yearning, a burning for someone to care for this baby to love it and want it to live. “Just to counteract the universal love of white baby dolls,” she wanted this baby to come into the world to change it, to change how the world viewed black babies, to “counteract” set off the balance, of the whole universe meaning everybody and the love it had for a doll rather…

    • 1246 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    In the novel, The Bluest Eye, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the tragic and devastating story of Pecola Breedlove. Innocent Pecola, however, is rejected in a very rational way by her community and most of all by her own parents. Well, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, as allured these characters into Naomi Wolf’s, theory that the true danger to a woman is another woman. The Breedlove family as attract themselves into a world where they have all lack self-esteem. With the lack of self-esteem the Breedlove’s, have all wear a mask to create a new identity for themselves. Through this the Breedlove’s are unable to build a familial relationship that would bond them together because they had face many life dilemmas in which there not able to aided…

    • 815 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Powerful Essays

    The Bluest Eye

    • 2035 Words
    • 9 Pages

    In The Bluest Eye, personally, sisterly love is represented as a “voice” to speak what is unspeakable. In other words, a sister gives words to another sister who is the ultimate “other” and who is silenced and damned by her unspeakable experience in the white patriarchal world.…

    • 2035 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Powerful Essays