Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
The bluest eye short essay
The bluest eye short essay
The bluest eye short essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: The bluest eye short essay
The organization of The Bluest Eye by season rather than the conventional chapter by chapter narrative suggests a cyclic occurrence, one of repetitive angst and in many ways irony. Pecola Breedlove’s life is a reflection of these seasons, the latter often being oxymoronic in relation to the actual chain of events. Each season connoted different aspects of Pecola's life and was often times the antithesis of her mere existence.
The novel starts off with autumn, a season of maturity and harvest. It is the time of enlightenment, a period of duality between light and dark. In this season, all things die before they are born, symbolizing spiritual ascent through descent. It is a time of inner preparation and the process of maturity, much like what Pecola experienced in the beginning of the novel. "Then we both looked where Pecola was standing. Blood was running down her legs." "Thats ministratin." The start of Pecola's menstruation cycle coincides with the season. This biological transition from childhood to womanhood represents the possibility of new life. What's ironic however is that i...
In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" a pair of brothers try to make sense of the urban decay that surrounds and fills them. This quest to puzzle out the truth of the shadows within their hearts and on the streets takes on a great importance. Baldwin meets his audience at a halfway mark: Sonny has already fallen into drug use, and is now trying to return to a clean life with his brother's aid. The narrator must first attempt to understand and make peace with his brother's drug use before he can extend his help and heart to him. Sonny and his brother both struggle for acceptance. Sonny wants desperately to explain himself while also trying to stay afloat and out of drugs. Baldwin amplifies these struggles with a continuous symbolic motif of light and darkness. Throughout "Sonny's Blues" there is a pervasive sense of darkness which represents the reality of life on the streets of Harlem. The darkness is sometimes good but usually sobering and sometimes fearful, just as reality may be scary. Light is not simply a stereotypical good, rather it is a complex consciousness, an awareness of the dark, and somehow, within that knowledge there lies hope. Baldwin's motif of light and darkness in "Sonny's Blues" is about the sometimes painful nature of reality and the power gained from seeing it.
Over the course of the novel, Celie, became a confident, independent, strong woman. The novel begins with fourteen year old, Celie, As the novel progresses
Like the season of spring, characters in novels are given a chance to be reborn. Going through life experiences and meeting people of different backgrounds, characters bloom into who the author meant for them to become. Symbolic measures, such as the bean trees also allow for the idea of rebirth to come through as one of the most important themes from the novel, The Bean Trees.
"And Pecola. She hid behind hers. (Ugliness) Concealed, veiled, eclipsed--peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask" (Morrison 39). In the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the main character, Pecola, comes to see herself as ugly. This idea she creates results from her isolation from friends, the community, and ever her family. There are three stages that lead up to Pecola portraying herself as an ugly human being. The three stages that lead to Pecola's realization are her family's outlook toward her, the community members telling her she is ugly, and her actually accepting what the other say or think about her. Each stage progresses into the other to finally reach the last stage and the end of the novel when Pecola eventually has to rely on herself as an imaginary friend so she will have someone to talk to.
This book discusses the viewpoints of many expert critics through extracts of their critical essays on the novel “The Bluest Eye”. Harold Bloom states Michael Woods narrative is the best he has seen of the book, “Each member of the family interprets and acts out of his or her ugliness, but none of them understands that the all-knowing master is not God but only history and habit; the projection of their own numbed collusion w...
That is when her life was complete. Because all of that has been taken away from her, she is able to experience and feel many different things that she has never experienced before in the Republic of Gilead.... ... middle of paper ... ...
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides social commentary on a lesser known portion of black society in America. The protagonist Pecola is a young black girl who desperately wants to feel beautiful and gain the “bluest eyes” as the title references.
A reader might easily conclude that the most prominent social issue presented in The Bluest Eye is that of racism, but more important issues lie beneath the surface. Pecola experiences damage from her abusive and negligent parents. The reader is told that even Pecola's mother thought she was ugly from the time of birth. Pecola's negativity may have initially been caused by her family's failure to provide her with identity, love, security, and socialization, ail which are essential for any child's development (Samuels 13). Pecola's parents are able only to give her a childhood of limited possibilities. She struggles to find herself in infertile soil, leading to the analysis of a life of sterility (13). Like the marigolds planted that year, Pecola never grew.
In the third chapter of The Bluest Eye, entitled "Autumn", Toni Morrison focuses on Pecola's family, the Breedloves. Morrison goes in depth about the family dynamic of the Breedloves and how it affects Pecola and her self-image. The passage starts after one of many arguments between Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's parents, turns violent. Mrs. Breedlove wants Cholly to fetch some coal from the outside shed. Cholly spent the last night drinking and does not want to get out of bed. The passage begins with the children becoming aware of the argument. Mrs. Breedlove starts to hit him with cooking pans while Cholly mostly used his feet and teeth. After the fight is over Mrs. Breedlove just lets Cholly lie on the ground and she goes about her business like nothing happened.
Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye contributes to the study of the American novel by bringing to light an unflattering side of American history. The story of a young black girl named Pecola, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 clearly illustrates the fact that the "American Dream" was not available to everyone. The world that Pecola inhabits adores blonde haired blue eyed girls and boys. Black children are invisible in this world, not special, less than nothing. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you lesser was cultivated by both whites and blacks. White skin meant beauty and privilege and that idea was not questioned at this time in history. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you less of a person contaminated black people's lives in many different ways. The taunts of schoolboys directed at Pecola clearly illustrate this fact; "It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth" (65). This self hatred also possessed an undercurrent of anger and injustice that eventually led to the civil rights movement.
Beauty is something that a lot of people in life strive for , because everyone has fitted in their mind what exactly beauty is. People know that it can help you out in life. But what most people don’t know is that, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Meaning that beauty should not be characterized by what people are told it is, beauty is different for everyone, what is beautiful for you may be ugly to someone else. The characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are confronted with the ideal of beauty and strive for it whether they know it or not. The two characters that I think were followed the ideal of beauty in Toni Morrison’s story are Pauline and Pecola.
...tain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” When the society fails to nurture flowers like Pecola, when nourishment of the soul is denied, the fruit of self-love is never realized and it becomes self-hatred, which lead to Pecola’s undesirable fate. She is driven to insanity and the ultimately to the garbage on the outskirts of town.
A main theme in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is the quest for individual identity and the influences of the family and community in that quest. This theme is present throughout the novel and evident in many of the characters. Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove and are all embodiments of this quest for identity, as well as symbols of the quest of many of the many Black people that were moving to the north in search of greater opportunities.
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.
She believes that if she could have blue eyes, their beauty would inspire kind behavior from others. Blues eyes in Pecola’s definition, is the pure definition of beauty. But beauty in the sense that if she had them she would see things differently. But within the world that Pecola lives in the color of one’s eye, and skin heavily influences their treatment. So her desperation for wanting to change her appearance on the account of her environment and culture seems child-like but it is logical. If Pecola could alter her appearance she would alter her influence and treatment toward and from others. In this Morrison uses Marxism as a way to justify Pecola’s change in reality depending on her appearance. The white ideologies reflected upon Pecola’s internal and external conflicts which allowed her to imagine herself a different life. The impacts of one’s social class also impacts one’s perspective of their race. The vulnerability created by the low social class allows racism to protrude in society and have a detrimental effect for the young black girls in “The Bluest Eye” (Tinsley).The quotes explained above express the social and economic aspect of the Marxist theory. The theory that centers around the separation of social classes and the relationship surrounding them not one’s internalization of oneself