In Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, the author examines the consequences of society's degradation of people. He sets his story in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1940s, where a society lives with white ideals and common standards of beauty. Morrison demonstrates the effect such racist ideas can have on people who don't put them into practice, through his authentic style, precise language, ability to relate to his readers, and a specific structure that persuasively points blame not only to society, in general, but to the readers themselves. Using examples of characters who fall victim to society and other characters who attempt to protest unjust ideals, Morrison creates a moving story about a vulnerable girl's mental breakdown and the society and world that has allowed her to descend. to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an original essay The honesty of Morrison's writing in The Bluest Eye, which is frank and occasionally vulgar, is crucial to the development of the society in which the novel is set, and also to the character development and description of their actions. The candid approach that Morrison takes in his work ensures that sentences are direct and simple. However there are also, in places, detailed descriptions and complex ideas, but these things still tend to be written simply. Morrison writes movingly in the “freshest, simplest, most striking prose” (Critical Perspectives 4). The author's careful attention to both the connotations of words and the cadences of language allows the desperation and oppression of the characters to be evident through their thoughts, words, and behaviors (Critical Perspectives 60). Although Morrison admits that he emphasized in his book “the codes embedded in black culture (Bloom 3), The Bluest Eye is written with an authentic voice that allows many identifiable themes and ideas to resonate with people of all races, genders and age. the author conveys her understanding of a young girl's resentment toward a society that shuns her, writing about girls like Claudia, who, although able to protest the black world's emulation of the white world by dismembering their dolls white. They cannot “destroy the sweet voices of parents and aunts, the obedience in the eyes of [their] peers, the elusive light in the eyes of [their] teachers as they encounter the chimes of Maureen's world (Baum 12). While this simply means that people who oppose the racism of their societies cannot liberate societies from their white ideals, Morrison describes this idea in an “eerily familiar [but] disturbing” way (Modern Critical Views 11). It does so by alluding to a specific person, whom any reader can call to mind, who is admired for things beyond his or her control, and therefore, beyond the control of anyone who does not possess or achieve them. Morrison writes from the right assumption that almost all people have known a Maureen Peal. She skillfully criticizes society for its advantage and unfair treatment of Maureen's chimes, describing the "sweet voices of parents" and the "shifting lights" in the eyes of teachers. Through her narrative in The Bluest Eye, Morrison shows the intuition of a young naive girl, Claudia, and in particular, uses her intuition to criticize society. Before the novel introduces Pecola's family, Claudia's family situation is revealed through her narration, which describes her family in stark contrast to the “Dick and Jane” story that precedes it. Claudia's family is described as cold andunloving until he says "And at night, when my cough was dry and strong, the feet entered the room, the hands ironed the flannel, readjusted the quilt and rested a moment on my forehead"...." So when I think of autumn, I think of someone with hands who doesn't want me to die” (Morrison 12) at such a young age, Claudia can only describe love in these limited terms, but it still evokes a feeling of warmth and love. familiar. Morrison refers to Claudia's mother as "someone with hands who doesn't want [Claudia] to die" to deliberately describe the love eloquently, which ultimately describes the kind of love that Mrs. MacTeer gives to her daughter. The diction through which Morrison has Claudia narrate shows Morrison's understanding of the desires of a young girl in Claudia's situation. The specific words demonstrate Morrison's ability to identify similarities between her characters and her readers. In describing her resentment of white dolls, Claudia shares that “If any adult had asked me what I wanted, they would have known that I didn't want to have anything to own, or own any objects. I rather wanted to feel something on Christmas Day. The real question would have been 'Dear Claudia, what experience would you like at Christmas?' I could have said 'I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama's kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play the violin just for me'” (Morrison 21-22). Morrison, through Claudia's voice, writes about Claudia's desires and is particularly effective in eliciting feelings of childlike happiness. By engaging the senses, Morrison appeals to the reader's memories, and the reader, in turn, relates to Claudia. Throughout the novel, Morrison writes using the voices of several narrators. However, many aspects of his writing style, such as bluntness and tendency towards simpler sentences, are consistent throughout. An important feature, which can be attributed to much of the novel, is also the raw and bold way in which Morrison writes. In the section where Pauline Breedlove recounts past accounts of her life and describes the beginning of her unhappiness, she says: “I don't think I ever got over it. There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth went missing. Everything went then. It seems like I never cared from then on” (Morrison 123). Morrison is frank in her choice of speech for Pauline, and she is bold in the extremes that Pauline uses to talk about the effect of losing a tooth on her life. The boldness of Morrison's style is also evident in his choice to make the loss of Pauline's teeth the beginning of her unhappiness (Critical Interpretation 91). For Pauline, however, “the simplest thing to do would be to build a box with her foot. This is what he did. But to discover the truth about how dreams die, you should never take the dreamer's word for it. The end of his adorable beginning was probably a cavity in one of his front teeth. He preferred, however, to always think about his foot (Morrison 110). The honesty with which Morrison writes eliminates any form of discretion. Morrison writes, perhaps most frankly in the entire novel, about Cholly's rape of Pecola. Morrison does this by denying the reader "the cover of metaphor and confronting the reader directly with Cholly's violation of Pecola." He uses precise diction when describing the beginning of the rape, saying, “The confusing mix of his memories of Pauline and of doing a wild, forbidden thing excited him, and a rush of desire ran along his genitals, giving him length” (Modern Critical opinions 7). Morrison's writing in The Bluest Eye demonstrates her mettle as a writer and, as evidenced by her style, theHis honest and courageous writing gives his work an authentic voice, which is of great importance in The Bluest Eye. The structure of The Bluest Eye, which Morrison executed uniquely, contributes immensely to the novel as a whole. Not only is it highly fragmented with much juxtaposition between adjacent sections, but it also features “looping narrative lines, flashbacks, and anticipatory predictions [that] equally veil and qualify meaning” (Bloom 69). The Bluest Eye follows an ironic counterpoint structure. The novel begins with a"Dick and Jane" is a children's story that serves mainly because of its contradiction with the daily lives of the MacTeers and especially the Breedloves (Bloom 22). The story begins with “Here is the house. It's green and white. Here's the family. Mother, father, Dick and Jane live in the green and white house. They are very happy” (Morrison 1). Sections of this story serve as titles that introduce their counterparts to the racist setting of 1940s Lorain, Ohio. Dick and Jane's green and white house introduces Breedlove's “annoying and melancholy” storefront apartment, and the family in this apartment couldn't be different from the family in the story. While the father in the story is strong and smiling, Cholly Breedlove is a bitter alcoholic. The happy family contrasts with the poor and miserable Breedloves (Bloom 22). The “Dick and Jane” primer is important not only because it provides “a particular set of expectations about ways of behaving, but because it places these expectations and behaviors in a realm of immutable archetypes – equivalent to Plato's idea of ​​the “real”” (Perspectives criticism 62). Therefore, since such a family and home cannot exist, Morrison repeats the same text two more times, first eliminating punctuation and capital letters, and then also eliminating all spaces. Morrison does this to “break and confuse” the story (Bloom 50). The introductory story that Morrison uses as the first part of the text in The Bluest Eye actually serves to juxtapose the real lives of people in Lorain, Ohio, as it directly precedes a short italicized passage in which Claudia narrates, in retrospect, remembering the events of the novel. In this section, Claudia recalls “but we were so deeply concerned about the health and safe delivery of Pecola's baby that we could think of nothing but our magic: if we planted the seeds and said the right words over them, they would flourish, and everything would be fine... It never occurred to any of us that the Earth itself could be unyielding. Although Claudia, in this section, reveals the fate of Pecola and her baby to the reader, Morrison's goal in the novel is to focus on the issues of the trial, not the final causes (Peterson 53). Morrison demonstrates this reason by writing, “There's really nothing else to say except why. But since the why is difficult to manage, we need to take refuge in the how." Thus, Morrison lays the foundation for the structure of everything else in the novel. Morrison is effective in addressing the "how" by dividing the novel into sections, both fragmented by the seasons and the narrative of a young Claudia. A structure like the one she uses allows the novel to delve deeper into the minds of the characters and allows the reader to understand the psyche of even the most antagonistic characters. The novel has this structure for a very particular reason; Morrison sets out to “explore the social and domestic aggression that could literally bring a child down” by confronting Pecola with a series of rejections (some routine, some exceptional), while seeking to “avoid complicity in the demonization process to which she was subjected Pecola” (Morrison xii). Morrison's framework accomplishes this. Describing the early years oflife of Pecola's parents (those who contributed to Pecola's downfall) and all the demoralizing and dehumanizing experiences that Pecola's parents had to go through, Morrison takes some of the blame away from them. Likewise, he goes into detail about the lack of care Junior's mother had for him and explains that she had more affection for the cat as Junior grew up. Although he makes no attempt to justify the unfair treatment of Pecola, Morrison establishes an understanding in the reader that each of Pecola's parents were “no less a victim” than Pecola was (Bloom 78). Pecola was destined for this type of fate, due to the way his parents were similarly condemned. As a Pecolapadre he had never experienced, and therefore never understood, the love of a parent, especially that of a father, he had no way of knowing how to treat his daughter. Cholly loved his daughter, but he was a dangerously free man: “Free to feel whatever he felt: fear, guilt, shame, pain, love, and pity” (Morrison 159). Cholly was “alone in his perceptions and his appetites and only they interested him” (Morrison 160). Right before Cholly rapes his daughter, he asks himself “What could he do for her, ever? What does it give her? What to tell her? What could a burned-out black man say to his hunchbacked eleven-year-old daughter?” (Morrison 161). The description of Cholly's life and how he became who he currently is in the novel leads to the moment where he wonders these things. The years of degradation, abandonment and humiliation lead Cholly to wonder how to treat his daughter and what he could do for her. Cholly's downfall by society, demonstrated before the rape, wreaks havoc on him at the end of the section, when he desperately wonders how he, as a father, should treat his daughter (Peterson 32). Morrison places the blame on the people and society who “vilified” Cholly, because he ends up becoming a character for whom ultimately “no glory is possible” (Critical Perspectives 2). By structuring the novel so that the reader is shown early glimpses into the lives of characters who later seem villainous and antagonistic, such as Junior, Pauline, and Cholly, glimpses that demonstrate the racial self-loathing they have suffered, or self-loathing general and anger, Morrison effectively points the critical finger at the company that "made the mess." Another important element of the structure of The Bluest Eye are the fragments narrated by Claudia MacTeer. These fragments serve two purposes; they provide a timeline based on the seasons of the year, which parallels the collapse of Pecola, and they also provide a more solid foundation and interesting insight into the events that happen in Pecola. The narrative begins in the fall, when only small fragments of Pecola's racial self-loathing can be detected. At this early stage in the novel, it isn't even seen as self-loathing; it is seen simply as the desire to have blue eyes and the admiration of Shirley Temple. However, Pecola is always aware of her apparent “ugliness”. She sees the support leaning on her from “every billboard, every movie, every glance.” Pecola then realizes that it is her blackness “that explains, creates, the disgust-rimmed void in the white eyes” (Critical Perspective 28). Pecola's inherent belief in this idea throughout the novel destroys her more and more. The division of seasons is not just about movement and the passage of time. The seasons provide sarcastic and brutal commentary on Pecola's descent into madness (Critical Perspectives 61). Her collapse is not only the result of the rape and death of the child, but also of small common circumstances along the way, like the way the shopkeeper looks at her when she buys candyMary Jane, the way the students at school always pick on her, tormenting her and bullying her, and the way her mother abuses her, still shows affection to a young white girl. As the seasons pass, Pecola's despondency becomes more evident. Evidence of her impending collapse could be seen even before she is raped by her father when she stands with her "back bent over the sink" and "her head on one side, as if crouched by a permanent and uninterrupted blow" (Morrison 161) . . Claudia is a necessary and powerful element in the novel, for the perspective she offers. Even though it seems like Pecola's story takes a backseat to Claudia's for most of the novel, Claudia's contribution and narration are necessary and effective. Centering the weight of the novel on a character as delicate and susceptible as Pecola would not have been a successful means of structuring the story, because the reader would be persuaded to pity Pecola, rather than examine himself for having done the “smashing” (Morrison xii). Therefore, Morrison invented the character of Claudia, to serve as a person who observed the change in Pecola at all times and whose perspective is important in Pecola's final analysis. “The use of Claudia as the child narrator of Pecola's Descent into Madness seems to be one of Morrison's most brilliant strokes. Of course, Pecola doesn't have the distance, space, or time to know what's happening to her. He can't look at his own history with hindsight, because he goes crazy” (Critical Perspectives 62). As a result of Claudia's narration, Claudia, in a sense, becomes a "voice of sorrow for the gravity of Pecola's situation" (Critical Perspectives 64). The breakdown of the novel's structure into the seasons and Claudia's narrative is essential to the progression of the novel. Many elements of Morrison's technique in The Bluest Eye serve to enrich and enhance the novel. An important technique in The Bluest Eye is Morrison's use of children's point of view. In several situations he portrays children as naive and unaware, but their comments and questions always maintain a certain depth in their essence. For example: “Like many children, Pecola asks puzzling questions due to both her naivety and her intuition. She asks one of these questions at age eleven: 'How,' she asks Frieda and Claudia, 'can you get someone to love you?'” (Peterson 22). Although this question seems naive, by its nature it demonstrates irony because it is actually an essential question that many characters in the novel deal with. Even if the children can't think of an answer, they don't realize that the novel provides a series of exemplary answers, through the “caustic camaraderie of the neighborhood whores, the desperate struggles of his parents, the sterile 'nesting' of women bourgeois black women and, more destructively, Pecola's rape by her father” (Peterson 22). Through Morrison's technique, she also incorporates small comments from the main characters that are scattered throughout the narrative in an intentionally brief way, but which give a lot of importance to the reader's understanding of the character's perception of certain things, and also cause the reader the feeling to reflect further on what was said. An example of such a comment is when Pecola decides “Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence” (Morrison 44). The fact that Pecola perceives love in this way reveals that she has been exposed to circumstances in which love was tainted or corrupted. After all, Pecola was exposed, above all, to the love of her parents, and “love is never better than the lover. The wicked love wickedly, the violent love violently, the weak love weakly, thestupid love stupidly” (Bloom 72). Therefore, it is likely that Pecola's view of love is distorted, just as her unique exposure to adult love was distorted. The naivety of the young characters in the novel can also be observed, which is important throughout the entire course of the novel. in the decision that Frieda and Claudia make on how to help Pecola. When their seeds fail to grow, they simply fail to understand that “the Earth itself may have been unyielding. [They] had dropped [their] seeds in [their] little plot of black earth, just as Pecola's father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black earth. [Their] innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or desperation” (Morrison 1-2). The idea that perhaps the Earth was unyielding is a more radical interpretation than the idea that it was simply random. The darkness associated with the Earth being adamant towards certain types of seeds further roots the novel's loss of innocence and the darkness the world can harbor. Morrison uses a technique in which young people lose their innocence through tragic and traumatic events. With the use of this technique, he is able to point the finger at society, for destroying the innocence of children, through their contempt and racial prejudice. Morrison has an “ideological design on us, his guilty readers, black and white, male and female” (Bloom 48). The technique of emphasizing the children's innocence and naivety is also effective because it is juxtaposed with the terrible things that eventually happen. Claudia and Frieda's coming to terms with the darkness they encounter is a symbol of their desperation. “The Bluest Eye launches a critique of perceived norms of beauty and morality” (Peterson 56). The standards of beauty and morality and the ideals that society projects onto its victims are what leads to the tragic end of the novel, Pecola Breedlove's eventual descent into madness. The novel is primarily about how people can be affected by racial contempt and the feelings of inferiority that are the result of such contempt. Morrison develops this theme by examining the effects that racial contempt (and society's rigid ideals of beauty and worth) have on the most vulnerable character possible, young Pecola. To emphasize social discrimination, Morrison incorporates Maureen Peal, a “yellow dream girl” who “enchanted the whole school,” as a means of counterpoint against Pecola. Maureen is adored by teachers and adults, unlike Pecola, and all her classmates like her. These things are true, simply because Maureen appears to come from a rich, close-knit family, and because she has expensive clothes and lighter skin. The extent to which Morrison describes Maureen's admiration truly describes the society of Lorain, Ohio in the 1940s. Society adores people like Maureen Peal, who have money and beauty (according to their ideals), and despises people like poor Pecola, who has nothing in her life and who is oppressively “ugly.” The theme of the entire novel is found in this simple juxtaposition (Peterson 120). The topic goes deeper than just the impact of society. The novel's concluding paragraph says: “This soil is harmful to certain types of flowers. It will not grow certain seeds, it will not bear certain fruits, and when the earth kills of its own free will, we acquiesce and say that the victim had no right to live. Of course we are wrong, but it doesn't matter. It's too late." The concluding paragraph addresses the crux of the theme of The Bluest Eye. Soil is harmful to some types of flowers and prevents seeds from growing. However, there is a parallel between this stated fact and the circumstances of Pecola's life (Critical Perspectives 92)..