Bluest eye

Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, presents the lives of several impoverished black families in the 1940’s in a rather unconventional and painful manner. Ms. Morrison leads the reader through the lives of select children and adults, describing a few powerful incidents, thoughts and experiences that lend insight into the motivation and. behavior of these characters. In a somewhat unconventional manner, the young lives of Pauline Williams Breedlove and Charles (Cholly) Breedlove are presented to the reader. Through these descriptions, the reader comes to understand how they become the kind of adults they are. Background information is given not necessarily to incur sympathy but to lend understanding.

The narrator makes the point that Pauline’s young life is filled with excuses because of her crippled foot. She could not understand why she of all the other children in her family had no nickname, no funny anecdotes about the things she had done or why she never felt at home anywhere. These experiences made her draw in upon herself and rely on a life she created, "restricted as a child to this cocoon of her family spinnings, she cultivated quiet and private pleasures, she liked most of all to arrange things." Thus as she approached womanhood, Pauline began to search for the life she did not have as a child.

After her marriage and children, Pauline becomes employed with a well to do white family who satisfied much of this hunger. As the narrator says, "praise, power and luxury were hers in this household...here she could arrange things, clean things, line things up in neat rows...here she found beauty, order, cleanliness and praise." Morrison describes another important phase in Pauline’s life, saying, "Pauline was fifteen, still keeping house, but with less enthusiasm. Fantasies about men and love and touching were drawing her mind and hands away from her work."

Thus it seems perfectly obvious how Pauline fell for the mysterious figure of Cholly Breedlove, "when the stranger, the someone appeared out of no where, Pauline was grateful but not surprised. Pauline and Cholly loved each other he seemed to relish her company and even to enjoy her country ways.... She was secure and grateful, he was kind and lively."

For the first time Pauline realized love and acceptance could be hers and she fell into a relationship wit...

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... of the relationship between sympathy and judgement of the character’s lives.

I found this book provocative in that it examined the "bad guy’s" life to such an extent that sympathy was possible. One obvious argument against this style is that explanation excuses cruelty and therefore Pauline and Cholly's actions as adults are justified. However, this reaction is based solely on the responses of the reader. Morrison presents the facts of the Breedlove's young lives without making pronounced judgements. The author presents a spread of experiences and actions and it is up to the individual to pick and choose what he must to create his own responses to the novel.

I think that it is possible for each individual reader to have completely different responses to the ways in which Cholly and Pauline are presented. I found the spectrum of interpretation o$ this novel to be a broad as each individual's experiences. The reader seems to get as much from the novel as he brings into it. Possibly, Toni Mossison intended the reader to be involved in her novel to the extent that he is forced to explore the relationship between sympathy and judgment, understanding and blindly condemning.