Free Sample Essays > Literature
The Bluest Eye
In the book, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison gets across a very powerful idea that is found in every society today. Although the book is written during the 1940’s and most of the events that occur mirror that time period, the main idea transcends to this day and age. With a persuasive argument in mind and a poor, innocent black girl to appeal to the reader’s pathos, Morrison craftily writes her story. She uses the rhetorical knowledge that arguments are often improved through the use of sensory details that allow us to see the reality of a problem or through stories that make specific cases and instances come alive. Morrison’s argument is how influential society can be on an individual and how strongly it’s ideas and views are impressed upon that individual. The ideas and views that she speaks of mostly pertain to beauty and what makes an individual beautiful. This idea of beauty can turn someone’s life upside down and in the end lead them to madness. Thus, Morrison is trying to impress upon her reader’s what a negative effect society’s ideas and views can have on an individual and how that individual’s life is changed forever.
The protagonist in The Bluest Eye is Pecola Breedlove. By society’s standards, Pecola is ugly. Morrison takes this poor, innocent, ugly, little black girl and shows the devastating effects of daily events. Morrison tries, to show a little girl as a total and complete victim of whatever was around her. People, in many cases, whites, would comment and say things without even thinking twice about their effects. For example, at one part of the book, Pecola has three pennies in her shoe which she has been saving to buy Mary Janes with. In the store, the owner, Mr. Yacobowski: looms up over the counter....Somewhere between retina and object, between vision and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance....She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition - the glazed separateness....Yet this vacuum is not new to her. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness....Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice(Morrison 49).
When she leaves the store “Pecola feels the inexplicable shame ebb.” She is then filled with anger. An innocent act of going to the store and buying candy, an act usually filled with happiness and anticipation, has turned into one of shame and anger. All of these horrible feelings because Pecola is an ugly black girl who does not meet society’s standards. Pecola, certainly, is expunged from human society even before she has awakened to a consciousness of self. Pecola stands for the triple indemnity of the female Black child: children, Blacks, and females are devalued in American culture.
In The Bluest Eye, the entire book [next page]