The bluest eye

Response

                The work that you chose for us to read, The Bluest Eye, is different from anything I’ve ever read. I think you chose this work so we would expand our minds, I had to look deeper for the meaning and understand concepts that I didn’t previously understand. Toni Morrison uses a different style in her writing. In this book she uses stream-of-consciousness narration, but not in the main characters mind. She uses free indirect discourse. The reader never really knows Pecola’s feelings or thoughts. Morrison tells of everyone else in the book, but never directly about Pecola, unless describing her outward appearance or features. In Morrison’s writing when she starts a new paragraph, she starts describing a new person. That person may have no contact with Pecola, but either something they did or someone they knew had affected Pecola’s life or even someone that had affected her greatly. It is almost as if Morrison is trying to justify people’s actions because she explains them out so much. She holds nothing back in her writing; she doesn’t try to hide the reader from all the hate and hurt in the world. She tells it all as it is; a reason for you having chosen this book.

                                ““Jealousy we understood and thought natural – a desire to have what somebody else had; but envy was a strange, new feeling for us. And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful, and not us.””

This novel is not just about blue eyes, partially about the desire of every little girl to be beautiful, but the plot not just blue eyes. The above passage was said by Claudia whose sister was Frieda. The sisters actually treated Pecola like a person, even though she was ugly, they still talked to her. Maybe it was pity, maybe it was something else, but they still cared. Jealousy; Pecola was not necessarily jealous