The Bluest Eye Study Guide
Lorain, Ohio(United States)
“The Bluest Eye” by Tony Morrison is a novel that is set in 1941. Is it a book written in an easy and airy narrative that dwells upon topics that leave everyone uneasy.
The eyes of a person. They can tell so much. They are the history, they are the character, they are the ocean and the universe. And for some people like Pecola, they are the sign of being a chosen one. Pecola, an African American girl who lives in a small town of Lorain, Ohio, suffers a lot from her origins and looks. She is jealous of blue eyes that are a sign of white people for her.
The story is told from a perspective of the girl who doesn’t realize why some people receive amazed gases, while all she gets is violence and abuse? Have you ever thought why people don’t like dandelions? They call them weeds, but they are so bright when they are yellow and so tender when they are white. Maybe they are just jealous of how strong these flowers are, covering all the lawns and sides of the roads.
The scenes from the life of there girls unfold in front of the reader and you can’t help feeling desperate to help them, to hold their hand and tell them it’s going to be alright, to tell them they are beautiful and they should and could love the way they are. But you can’t, and the girls get laughed at, teased, raped, pregnant. The author’s style doesn’t call upon you to do something, to protest, to be better. It simply tells the story that will never allow you to be the same as before.
The book is a serious reading and its topics are deep and painful. That’s why it has been prohibited from reading in numerous institutions and communities. Today we have a privilege to have unlimited access to it and it’s worth discovering the text to better understand these phenomena in American life.
Author: Marshall Vasquez
New Essays
‘The Bluest Eye’ by Toni Morrison is a book about finding and accepting your true beauty. It is a novel that states; if we try and see through a different perspective, we might actually be able to find that we have the strength to accomplish whatever we want. The Breedlove’s- a poor, black family-...
Question 2: Discuss Claudia’s reactions to representations of beauty in her culture. To what extent does she rebel against what the dominant culture regards as beautiful? To what degree is she complicit in the social prejudices and prejudgments that she grows up with? Claudia shows clear signs of...
The Bluest Eye by Tony Morrison Summary and Analysis of prologue and Autumn The Bluest Eye opens with two short untitled and unnumbered sections. The first section is a version of the classic Dick and Jane stories found in grade school reading primers. There is a pretty house, Mother, Father, Dick...
The extract from the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison outlines the casualties that an African-American family faces from a young girl’s perspective. The author effectively uses the point of view of a young girl to instigate both a sympathetic and empathetic response from the reader. The transition of...