The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison (1970)
“Morrison's devastating debut asks what happens when a little Black girl in 1941 Ohio prays every night for blue eyes — and what kind of world taught her to want them.”
Character Analysis
The novel's center of gravity who is paradoxically its least vocal character. Morrison gives Pecola almost no sustained first-person narration — she is seen rather than heard, described rather than self-described, until madness finally gives her a voice that speaks only to herself. She is eleven years old, raped by her father, pregnant, abandoned by everyone. She is not a symbol — Morrison is insistent that she is a child. But the world made her into a symbol: of ugliness, of failure, of everything the community needed to disown. Her desire for blue eyes is the precise measurement of what the culture has done to her.
Almost no sustained first-person speech in the novel — her voice is the most absent. When she does speak, her sentences are short, tentative, often questions. In the final section, she speaks compulsively to a voice only she can hear.