Santiago Nazar and Cholly Breedlove, two opposing men In both Chronicle of a Death Foretold, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the male characters are affected by the social hierarchy of their communities. The novel written by Marquez is set in a small town of South America, and the official main character, Santiago Nazar, is described as a young, wealthy and handsome Arab man. In The Bluest Eye, the novel written by Toni Morrison, the story takes place in a small town of Ohio and portrays Cholly Breedlove, an abusive, alcoholic and violent Black father. These two individuals are both affected by the social rules which conduct their societies, such as machismo and racism. But even though Santiago and Cholly …show more content…
In The Bluest Eye, Cholly and his family belong to the Black community -which was at the time inferior to the white one- and moreover, they are ones of the poorest. Toni Morrison describes their accommodation, “The large ‘store’ area was partitioned into two rooms by beaverboard planks that dit not reach to the ceiling. There was a living room, which the family called the front room, and the bedroom, where all the living was done. […] There was no bath facilities.” (34-35). The rudimentary conditions in which Cholly lives illustrate his belonging to the lowest social class of all: the poorer of the poorest. Being aware of this fact, Cholly turned into an angry and defeated man. In contrast, in Chronicle of a Death Foretold, Santiago is a proud and arrogant white man because he knows that he is one of the wealthiest of his town. Gabriel Garcia Marquez describes his accommodation, “The house was a former warehouse, with two stories, walls of rough planks, […] in back he built a stable for four animals, the servants’ quarters, and a country kitchen with windows opening onto the dock, […] In the front he built two full-length windows with lathe-turned bars” (10-11). This two stories house, with quarters dedicated for servants, highlights the prosperity of Santiago’s family. The contrast drawn between Cholly’s and Santiago’s housing and living conditions is …show more content…
Two terms designate someone who is separated from a group: other and outsider. But there is a subtlety: the “other” is the one perceived by the group as not belonging, whereas the “outsider” is only distanced from the group. In The Bluest Eye, Cholly is described as an “other”. Within his own community -the Black one- he has no acquaintances or friends. He only has a wife and two kids, who all hate him. One of his neighbor says, “Cholly Breedlove, then, a renting black, having put his family outdoors, had catapulted himself beyond the reaches of human consideration. He had joined the animals; was, indeed,an old dog, a snake, a ratty nigger.” (18). Cholly’s dehumanization by someone from the Black community emphasizes the fact that he is indeed perceived by the “group” as not belonging. In Chronicle of a Death Foretold however, Santiago is only described as an “outsider”. He is distanced from the “group” because he is Arab. In the small town in which the novel is set, the Arabs from a peaceful minority. Even though they are not rejected, they usually stay together and marry together. The narrator says about Santiago, “He had turned twenty-one the last week in January, and he was slim and pale and had his father's eyelids and curly hair. [...] They spoke Arabic between themselves, but not in front of Plácida Linero, so that she wouldn't feel excluded” (7). But Santiago’s ethnicity did
Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, centers her novel around two things: beauty and wealth in their relation to race and a brutal rape of a young girl by her father. Morrison explores and exposes these themes in relation to the underlying factors of black society: racism and sexism. Every character has a problem to deal with and it involves racism and/or sexism. Whether the characters are the victim or the aggressor, they can do nothing about their problem or condition, especially when concerning gender and race. Morrison's characters are clearly at the mercy of preconceived notions maintained by society. Because of these preconceived notions, the racism found in The Bluest Eye is not whites against blacks. Morrison writes about
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove. Furthermore, the novel explains how society shapes an individual's character by instilling beauty expectations. Morrison is effective in relaying her message about the various impacts that society has on an individual's character through imagery, diction, and symbolism by showing that
The desire to feel beautiful has never been more in demand, yet so impossible to achieve. In the book “The Bluest Eye”, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the story of two black families that live during the mid-1900’s. Even though slavery is a thing of the past, discrimination and racism are still a big issue at this time. Through the whole book, characters struggle to feel beautiful and battle the curse of being ugly because of their skin color. Throughout the book Pecola feels ugly and does not like who she is because of her back skin. She believes the only thing that can ever make her beautiful is if she got blue eyes. Frieda, Pecola, Claudia, and other black characters have been taught that the key to being beautiful is by having white skin. So by being black, this makes them automatically ugly. In the final chapter of the book, the need to feel beautiful drives Pecola so crazy that she imagines that she has blue eyes. She thinks that people don’t want to look at her because they are jealous of her beauty, but the truth is they don’t look at her because she is pregnant. From the time these black girls are little, the belief that beauty comes from the color of their skin has been hammered into their mind. Mrs. Breedlove and Geraldine are also affected by the standards of beauty and the impossible goal to look and be accepted by white people. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison uses the motif of beauty to portray its negative effect on characters.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the impact of home on childhood, the formative years of any human. Throughout the book, she describes the childhoods of both adults, namely Polly Breedlove and Cholly Breedlove, and children, specifically Pecola, Claudia, and “Junior,” and leaves the reader to figure out how their childhoods shaped who they are. In the novel. Morrison argues that the totality of one’s childhood, including one’s home and experiences, is key in forming one’s disposition and character later in life. In doing so, Morrison wants the reader to see that the best defense against a predatory, racist society is the home.
Parents are the first role models that children are exposed to, making them immensely influential in the development of a child’s personality. The diverse group of parents in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, demonstrate the consequences of bad parenting on a child. Being set in 1940’s America, the black community in the book is still not fully accepted by society, and racism plays a significant role in the character’s lives. Here, readers are introduced to the Breedloves, a dysfunctional black family that is outcast from their community. Throughout the book, the parenting experienced by the Breedloves alters their perception of love, setting them up for failure as a
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows that anger is healthy and that it is not something to be feared; those who are not able to get angry are the ones who suffer the most. She criticizes Cholly, Polly, Claudia, Soaphead Church, the Mobile Girls, and Pecola because these blacks in her story wrongly place their anger on themselves, their own race, their family, or even God, instead of being angry at those they should have been angry at: whites.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison strongly ties the contents of her novel to its structure and style through the presentation of chapter titles, dialogue, and the use of changing narrators. These structural assets highlight details and themes of the novel while eliciting strong responses and interpretations from readers. The structure of the novel also allows for creative and powerful presentations of information. Morrison is clever in her style, forcing readers to think deeply about the novel’s heavy content without using the structure to allow for vagueness.
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, depicts characters desperately seeking to attain love through a predetermined standard of beauty established and substantiated by society. Morrison intertwines the histories of several characters portraying the delusions of the ‘perfect’ family and what motivates their quest for love and beauty. Ultimately, this pursuit for love and beauty has overwhelming effects on their relationships and their identity.
The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.
The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison that reveals many lessons and conflicts between young and adult characters of color. The setting takes place during the 1940s in Lorain, Ohio. The dominant speaker of this book is a nine year old girl named Claudia MacTeer who gets to know many of her neighbors. As a result of this, Claudia learns numerous lessons from her experience with the citizens of Lorain. Besides Claudia, The Bluest Eye is also told through many characters for readers to understand the connection between each of the adults and children. Many parents in the novel like Geraldine and Pauline Breedlove clearly show readers how adults change their own children. Furthermore, other adult characters like Cholly Breedlove
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison narrates the lives of two families, the MacTeer family and the Breedlove family. The novel digs into the themes of love, envy, and weakness, while maintaining a thick and interesting plotline. These themes are conveyed thoroughly through Morrison’s literary style. Toni Morrison’s powerful writing and structural techniques add depth to the novel, enhancing certain emotions while developing a riveting plot.
The Bluest Eye concentrates on the key contemporary American issues: racial and sexual politics. More distinctly, the novel centres on the impact that socially constructed views of race have on gender relations within the black community. As Butler-Evans highlights, “race rather than gender had become the overriding sign for the oppression of black people” and Morrison’s novel responds to this political issue by focusing on this in correlation with the Eurocentric society setting of the novel. The racial oppression suffered by the black community shape ideas of black masculinity based on male feelings of inferiority and consequent sexual oppression of black females. Morrison systematically explores the relationship between the racial oppression of black males and sexual oppression of black females. The main focus of this essay will be an exploration of how racial oppression experienced by black males, specifically Cholly and Junior, relate to the sexual oppression they enforce on black females.
Morrison's story asserts that children, by nature of their diminutive size and inability to contribute economically to the family, are society's weakest members. Children play a prominent role in The Bluest Eye because they are the vulnerable recipients of their parent's psychological manifestations. At some point in early life, every child feels weak and unimportant; ignored, even. But there are gradations of neglect, and these variations are explored in the novel.
The middle class black society and the lower class black society, for example, are quite different from each other and are constantly conflicting. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison distinguishes these divisions and their tensions through characters like Geraldine, Junior, and Maureen Peal, who represent the privileged division of black culture. On the contrary, the less privileged division is represented by the MacTeer family and the “relentlessly and aggressively ugly” Breedlove family (The Bluest Eye 38). Tension between the divided African American society is clearly represented by such characterizations throughout Morrison’s novel.
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.