Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye, a Novel: A Novel (Maxnotes)

Rating:
Summary: Well-written, extremely depressing subject
Review: After reading this book twice, once for a school assignment and once for my own pleasure, it successfully depressed me enough both times so I won't read it again. I can't say the book was bad, but I can't say I enjoyed it either. It was just one bad thing after another. I just have mixed feelings about this book altogether.

Rating:
Summary: The Eye of the Beholder
Review: I believe that Toni Morrison is one of the most challenging authors America has ever produced. She fails to ever talk down to her audience, but rather, challenge us to aspire to higher levels of meaning by writing challenging literature of the highest quality. Thus, "The Bluest Eye" falls into that category.

As her first novel, Morrison herself suggests that at the time of her writing this, she was not advanced enough to handle the language, and therefore, finds it somewhat clumsy. The book I read was incredibly rich and deep, inspirational and chilling.

We find one narrator of the story, a little girl named Claudia, retelling the events of a another black girl in her small Ohio town, and the horrible things that Pecola had to endure. Described by nearly every character in the novel as "ugly", Pecola's only wish is to have blue eyes, so that she can attain the societal expectation of "attractiveness". Pecola comes from a warped, unsupportive family, which thereby shapes Pecola's viewpoint and outlook on her own life.

One thing Morrison does so efeectively in her novels is switch narrators whenever she sees fit. At times, Claudia tells us the story; at others, a third person narrator allows us to soar above the story and get more important information that a little girl may not be privvy too. At at times, we even learn about the events of the story through women who merely gossip the story. The effect allows us, the reader, to garner more informaton, some of it in personal ways, to allow us a grander sense of this story.

Morrison's literature, in every sense of the word, challenges the reader at every turn. This is not a book to read lightly, or just dabble in. Because of her writing, and her writing style, she is able to make grand stories out of the most ordinary people; to give voice to those characters in literature most often overlooked or marginalized in our culture. Morrison must keep writing to allow those voices to ring clear, and add to the cacophany of voices that make America as strong as it is.

Rating:
Summary: A superb first novel by a major artist
Review: Originally published in 1970, Toni Morrison's "The Bluest Eye" was the first novel by a writer who would go on to receive the Nobel Prize for literature, and be acclaimed as one of the major literary figures in the United States. But if you wish, ignore the author's history and just go ahead and read the book: it is one of the most powerful, devastating portrayals of African-American life ever written.

"Eye" centers around Pecola Breedlove, a small Black girl from a horrifically dysfunctional family (in a 1993 afterword, Morrison describes them as "a crippled and crippling family"). Pecola's story begins in the fall of 1941, but Morrison moves back in time to tell the fuller story of the girl and her family. Morrison's skill as a writer is evident from the opening pages, in which she chillingly deforms the archetypal, Eurocentric "Dick and Jane" readers.

A central theme of "Eye" is how Black children's psyches can be damaged by the Eurocentric foci of American popular culture. Figures like the Raggedy Ann dolls and Hollywood stars become ominous figures in Pecola's tragedy. The story is full of memorable, often grotesque characters, such as three prostitutes (described as "merry gargoyles") whom Pecola loves.

"Eye" is full of painful, shocking incidents that illustrate the contours of human cruelty, abuse, and brokenness. I believe that this novel shows Morrison to be a true literary heir of William Faulkner. "The Bluest Eye" may strike some readers as just too horrific and depressing, but I believe that it is a novel that deserves an attentive readership.