Analysis Of The Novel ' The Bluest Eye '

Throughout My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, the change of seasons is often mentioned and represents the hardships and beauties of the world. The summer and spring are examples of the beauties in the world since the citizens are able to work due to the long days. The spring is almost as important as the summer since it is the time of year when farmers begin to farm again after the winter. But, the winter is unforgiving. During the winter all of citizens are hiding in their nice warm houses trying to avoid the harsh cold. Due to the citizens’ perseverance and hard work their town is able to thrive.

For centuries, seasons have been understood to stand for the same set of meanings. Seasons are easily understood by the reader, and are easy for the writer to use; as Foster states, “Seasons can work magic on us, and writers can work magic with seasons” (Foster 192). The different seasons are a huge part of our lives; we live through each one every year, and we know how each of them impacts our lives. This closeness between people and nature allows us to be greatly impacted by the use of seasons in literature. In addition, Foster lays out the basic meanings of each season for us: autumn is harvest, decline, tiredness; winter is anger, hatred, cold, old age; summer is passion, love, happiness, beauty; and spring is childhood and youth. On the

The seasons in the poem also can be seen as symbols of time passing in her life. Saying that in the height of her life she was much in love and knew what love was she says this all with four words “summer sang in me.” And as her life is in decline her lovers left her, this can be told by using “winter” as a symbol because it is the season of death and decline from life and the birds left the tree in winter. The “birds” can be seen as a literal symbol of the lovers that have left her or flown away or it can have the deeper meaning that in the last stages of our life all of our memories leave us tittering to our selves.

* Passing - In this book every season symbolized what was going to happen or the type of emotion the characters were going to experience in that chapter. In the beginning of the book it is a very hot day and Irene goes out to get some iced tea and meets an old “friend” Claire who she does not like. She then goes to Claire’s house for tea where she meets her white husband who is very prejudiced against black people. This causes her to leave very outraged. He anger matched with the season/weather that day.

Between Shades of Gray takes place in 1941, when fifteen-year-old Lina and her family are precipitously taken away from their home in Lithuania by the Soviet Union and transported to a Siberian labor camp. The long and horrific train ride to Siberia is pervaded with barbarity, and once the prisoners arrive, they are only faced with more cruelty. Lina, a gifted artist, records her experience in drawings kept hidden from the cruel guards, as she documents her struggles to keep faith in humanity.

As stated before, it is based or should one say inspired by the life of the slave Margaret Garner, who was an African American slave . She attempts to escape in 1856 Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, which was a free state. A mob of slave owners, planters and overseers arrived to repossess her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue

     Beauty is said to be in the eyes of the beholder, but what if the image of beauty is forced into the minds of many? The beauty of a person could be expressed in many different ways, as far as looks and personality goes, but the novel The Bluest Eye begs to differ. It contradicts the principle, because beauty is no longer just a person’s opinion but beauty has been made into an unwritten rule, a standard made by society for society. The most important rule is that in order to be beautiful, girls have to look just like a white doll, with blue eyes, light pink skin, and have blond hair. And if they’re not, they are not beautiful. Pecola, one of community’s ugly children, lives life each day wanting to

The seasons play a major role in the development of the plot, allowing action to skip several months at a time by simply mentioning the turning of the leaves. The thematic imagery

Towards the first third of the novel, Pecola goes to buy penny candy from Yacobowski’s Fresh Veg. Meat and Sundries Store. As she is walking to the store she notices the dandelions on the path and

There are several novels written by two of the worlds most critically acclaimed literary writers of the 20th century James Baldwin and Toni Morrison. But I would like to focus on just two of their works, James Baldwin's Giovanni's Room, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. In these novels in some way the authors suggest a theme of how the past is rooted in the present. Now each of these authors shows this in a different way. This is because of the contrast in their story outline and the structures of their novels. Yet they both seem to suggest that if the past is not clear then the present or the future can not be clear as well. One can not run from ones past, it will only dictate ones future.

The memories created in the past form into experiences that can either hinder or aid an individual’s ability to deal with the situations he or she faces later in life. Oliver Sacks, author of The Mind’s Eye presumes that the experiences that have been perceived by the senses become the files stored in our memory and promote the brain and mind to reshape themselves when necessary. Azar Nafisi, author of Selections from Reading Lolita in Tehran reveals the impact of political oppression and how it compels freedom seeking women to take part in actions such as secretly discussing fictional literature, unveiling, and withdrawing from the controlled world. Martha Stout, author of When I Woke Up Tuesday Morning, it was Friday, observes that when an individual is unable to let go of past emotions, those emotions that have has great traumatic impact cause the person to repetitively recollect past events and live in a state of dementia. Although all three authors take account for different people with different traumatic experiences, each supports the idea that we, has humans, perceive the world in a way that we experience and define the real world outside our minds. Through past experiences, free will, imagination, and some form of therapy, the individuals presented in all three texts were able to escape the realities they were a part of and create their own worlds.

were dirty and loud”(Morrison 87).She is teaching her son how to acknowledge the difference between black people, the colored who would be fair skinned and the African Americans who are dark skinned. She did not want her son Junior to play with dark skinned black people because she found them to be dirty and loud. This was one problem the delusion of passing caused. Geraldine already passed and was welcomed by the white community and left behind her dark skinned people later pushing them away in order to keep her status in the white community.

In the novel The Bluest Eye Pecola is involved in a quest – for love and identity and Morrison depicts the world in the novel from a child’s point of view. The story of the eleven-year-old Pecola, the tragic female protagonist of The Bluest Eye, stemmed out of Morrison’s memory of a girlhood friend who as well craved for ‘blue eyes’. Morrison had written of the little Black girl whom she knew :

The narrative shift also serves to compare how Pecola and Claudia react to the concept of blue eyes as the ultimate beauty and shows the psychological strength of each girl.

Toni Morrison wrote The Bluest Eye in order to discuss race, gender, and class. She does a careful and intentional dance along the axis of oppression she is speaking on. Her pointed stories of abuse, self loathing, and rape are juxtaposed to the soft imagery of nature. The book is separated into four sections named after the seasons. Rarely does a page go by where Morrison does not wax poetic about marigolds, or set a scene with forsythia. And yet, though she uses these images to soften the setting in which atrocities take place, they are often used in such a manner that the harshness of the events bleed into the imagery. Creating the malevolent force that is nature in the novel, and the streak of ironic imagery that runs through Morrisons writing.