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.”
Short Summary
In Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove believes that if she had blue eyes, everyone would love her. Her family is violently poor and violently broken — her father Cholly rapes her twice, she becomes pregnant, and the baby dies. Morrison frames this destruction through the eyes of Claudia MacTeer, who narrates retrospectively as an adult, and through the novel's central ironic device: the Dick-and-Jane primer, whose cheerful domestic sentences are reprinted at the front of the book and then fragmented and distorted as the novel proceeds. Pecola ends the novel in madness, convinced she has the bluest eyes in the world. The community that destroyed her — through poverty, racism, internalized self-hatred, and indifference — watches her walk the edges of fields talking to herself, and nobody does anything.
Detailed Summary
The novel opens with three reprints of the same passage from a Dick-and-Jane primer — the idealized white middle-class reading material of mid-century American schoolchildren. First printed normally, then without punctuation, then compressed into an illegible wall of text with no spaces at all. This...