The Bluest "I" Yearning For The Bluest Eye: An Analysis Of The Writing Strategy, Characterization And The Blues Aesthetic Of Toni Morrison's Novel--the Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is a famous American black women novelist. She is the winner of the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. Her novels' focuses are on the black women and their worlds. Morrison once said in an interview of 1980 that the motive of her creating the Bluest Eye is to describe "those edged little girls whom anybody never treated seriously anywhere in literature". The Bluest Eye tells us the eleven-year-old Pecola's experience within one year. In 1941, Pecola comes to know that her trouble is due to her blackness and ugliness, she hopes to change herself to get attention from others. She prays for her eyes to turn blue: so that she will be beautiful, so that her parents will stop fighting, so that people will look at her, so that her world will be different. Raped by her father, Pecola gives birth to a dead baby, without any help Pecola descends into madness. She feels that she has got "the bluest eye", and talks with them all the time. The plot seems uncomplicated, but Morrison adopts unique writing strategies, which make full of deep cultural meanings: facing with the supreme white culture intrusion, the black people are confused with thinking and value. The book is divided into the seasons of the year, reflecting on the tragedy of Pecola. Spring, summer, autumn and winter are irresistible natural law. Using four seasons as the titles, Morrison wants to present that the tragedy of Pecola is unavoidable. Another uniqueness is the primer of Dick and Jane. This excerpt is repeated three times in the prelude: the opening paragraph is simple, clear and orderly. The second is a repetition of the first but without punctuation marks. The third is also a repetition but without punctuation and without division. Dick and Jane deals with a white American ideal of the family unit --- cohesive, happy, with love enough to spare to pets, but it is quite different from the poor life of the black people. In the Bluest Eye, the characters either keep their own cultural tradition or are assimilated by the supreme culture, either locate on the edge or become the sacrifice or scapegoat. Mrs. McTeer and Claudia belong to the accepted characters by their community; Pauline and Geraldine are assimilated characters; Soaphead Church is edged people; Pecola Breedlove is a scapegoat. Music is the effective art, which can sublimate the painful experiences of the black people. The Blues is the slow jazz music, which expresses the feelings of deep sadness and depression. In the Bluest Eye, Claudia uses the Blues tradition to narrate the Pecola's tragedy. As Pecola loses the ability of telling her tragic fate, and she can't express her bitterness through the Blues, Claudia becomes the right person to fulfill this task. Claudia sings the Blues for Pecola to tell Pecola's tragedy.