The Bluest EyeBy Toni Morrison Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye takes place in 1941, in a small Ohio town. The main characters are black little girls trying to understand the cruel world they have been born into. Two sisters, Claudia and Frieda, are fo

The Bluest Eye
By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye takes place in 1941, in a small Ohio town. The main characters are black little girls trying to understand the cruel world they have been born into. Two sisters, Claudia and Frieda, are fortunate enough to have a family that cares about them. The third little girl, Pecola, has a cruel, indifferent family. All three girls are bombarded with both subtle and blatant messages communicating to them that blacks are inferior and ugly. Morrison uses the extreme case of Pecola to illustrate how all blacks internalized society’s notion of beauty and ugliness.
A Dick and Jane story at the opening creates a psychotic feel, very different than your happy everyday Dick and Jane story. The short story is repeated three times, the second time driven by eliminating punctuation, and the third time, accelerated at maximum velocity by complete absence of spaces between words. The reader feels dizzy and sees the story spin o...