The Bluest Eye Analysis

Claudia, another character who goes through a similar situation compared to Pecola. She is a young girl who came out from a loving family and is intrusive, yet sensitive.

Besides the inherent self-confident issue, the outside voice from community is also affecting Pecola’s view. For example, in the “accident” when Pecola went into Junior’s house, Junior killed the cat and impute to Pecola. His mother, Geraldine, saw Pecola was holding the dead cat. Without any thought and didn’t even ask for the truth, Geraldine simply called Pecola a “nastylittle black bitch.” This event, again, reinforces Pecola’s view of what beauty means.

As a child, he was not loved by his mother. She prefered her cat to her own son. Junior saw this at an early age and “spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86). Junior locked Pecola in a room, becoming the perpetrator with the same turn of attitude as Cholly. When he saw that the cat liked Pecola, he threw the cat, killing it, because the thing his mother loved more than himself loved her. Pecola’s wish could be paralleled to the cat. It had blue eyes, and was loved dearly by someone, which could explain the attention she gave to the cat. Junior even said, “Gimme my cat! (90). Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with the cat and even tortured it, but with it being the only connection to his mother, he called it his own. Pecola’s dream, or having the same attention as the cat, was killed when the cat was killed. Junior was not loved by his mother, only taken care of to live. She did not “allow her baby, Junior, to cry…[she] did not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). This unlove for her family caused Junior to be victimized, and then alter his ways, and become the perpetrator. Pecola is the victim in the rage of Junior, only because his mother did not love him. She wanted someone to be kind to her, and love her, but that was only met with

have white beauty is so strong that she eats Mary Jane candies, fantasizing that the candies will

I was a little confused by the last chapter. Who was Pecola talking to? It was sad for me to see Pecola obsess over believing she had been given blue eyes. In the last chapter the sentence, “A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment”, showed the relationship between beauty and skin color and how destructive beauty can be. I feel like because of what had happened to Pecola she was so desperate to be beautiful and happy, that she believed she actually had blue eyes. She thought her blue eyes were the reason that people avoided her, when it was really because of what had happened between her and Cholly. Overall, I found the book

Society continues to rape Pecola through its refusal to acknowledge her as a human being. Since society thinks she is “ugly”, no one needs to care for or love her. For example, one of the biggest insults that her peers use for teasing boys is using Pecola as the insult.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison depicts racism all throughout the novel. Discrimination is very heavy in the 1940s, and the protagonist Pecola Breedlove experiences that. Pecola is a lower-class black girl who is constantly picked on for not only her looks, but her uncontrollable family situation. Maureen Peal is a new girl that arrives at Pecola’s school, and she is an upper-class, wealthy black girl. When Maureen goes out for ice cream with Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia, the girls talk about menstruation, and Maureen accuses Pecola if she has ever seen her father naked. Pecola denies the accusation, and conflict arises between the girls. Maureen shouts, “‘I am cute! And you are ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!’” (Morrison 73).

“Again, the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her.” [This quote represents the emotions that flood through Pecola’s father’s head after he rapes her. Prior to and during raping Pecola, Pecola’s father is enraged with many emotions. These emotions include anger, tenderness and l0ve towards Pecola. This is a significant quote in the novel because this is one of the few parts of where Pecola’s father, Cholly’s, character is shown. This quote reveals Cholly’s character because it shows that the events that happened in his

With some background knowledge on Pauline, the mother of Pecola, it’s easier to understand some of Pecola's core traits. There are parallelisms between Pecola and Pauline. They find their reality too harsh to deal with, so they become fixated on one thing that makes them happy, and they ignore everything else. Pecola's desire for blue eyes is more of an inheritance that she received from her mother. One of Pauline’s own obsessions was back when she was fascinated with the world of the big pictures. As long as they can believe in their fantasies, they're willing to sacrifice anything else.

Pecola then starts to disintegrate into her fantasy world in an attempt to make herself feel better. In asking "please God... please make me disappear," she wants to leave this ugly place that is her home and her family (45). Morrison then leads the reader through the process of Pecola's different body parts disappearing, from her "fingers... one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow... the legs all at once... her stomach... then her chest, her neck" (45). This succession of "slowly, now with a rush... [and] slowly again" fading body parts illustrates how much effort Pecola is putting into disappearing and how much this effort puts a toll on her body (45). In making herself feel better she is also tiring herself out, for the exertion she puts out does not make her happy and does not fulfill what she wants in the end: to fully disappear.

If she had beautiful blue eyes, Pecola imagines, people would not want to do ugly things in front of her or to her. The accuracy of this insight is affirmed by her experience of being teased by the boys—when Maureen comes to her rescue, it seems that they no longer want to behave badly under Maureen’s attractive gaze. In a more basic sense, Pecola and her family are mistreated in part because they happen to have black skin. By wishing for blue eyes rather than lighter skin, Pecola indicates that she wishes to see things differently as much as she wishes to be seen differently. She can only receive this wish, in effect, by blinding herself. Pecola is then able to see herself as beautiful, but only at the cost of her ability to see accurately both herself and the world around her. The connection between how one is seen and what one sees has a uniquely tragic outcome for

The plot in The Bluest Eye is the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl whose fondest wish is to miraculously awaken one day with blue eyes, thinking that perhaps it will make her mother attentive and her father loving:

This can be seen toward the end of the novel, on page 199, where, in a conversation between Pecola and a figure of her thoughts, Morrison reveals that Pecola may have been raped twice. “You said he tried to do it to you when you were sleeping on the couch. ‘See there! You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It was when I was washing dishes,’” reads the exchange. These lines also tell the reader that even with this information, Pecola is still internally unsure of what happened herself. Through internal dialogue, her personal insecurities are projected. Dialogue is key in presenting major ideas in the novel.

Pauline eventually meets Cholly, who is Pecola’s biological father, and they fall in love. "He seemed to relish her company and even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful; he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in the world." (Morrison, p. 115)

There are many themes that seem to run throughout this story. Each theme and conflict seems to always involve the character of Pecola Breedlove. There is the theme of finding an identity. There is also the theme of Pecola as a victim. Of all the characters in the story we can definitely sympathize with Pecola because of the many harsh circumstances she has had to go through in her lifetime. Perhaps her rape was the most tragic and dramatic experience Pecola had experiences, but nonetheless she continued her life. She eliminates her sense of ugliness, which lingers in the beginning of the story, and when she sees that she has blue eyes now she changes her perspective on life. She believes that these eyes have been given