Ambiguity In The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is honored as one of the greatest novelists in American literary circle.As Morrison's debut in the literary arena,The Bluest Eye did not have an instant success when it was first published in 1970.Yet comments and critical papers about this novel has sprung up like mushrooms since she won the Noble literature prize.Most critics focus on race,gender,identity,trauma,and anxiety in The Bluest Eye.While a few critics note the ambiguity of the novel,they all limited themselves in analyzing the semantic and syntactic aspects of the novel,instead of analyzing ambiguity in the theme of this novel.This thesis analyzes ambiguity in the themes of The Bluest Eye and finds that ambiguity is an important cause of leading to the degeneration of the black.Part One gives a definition of ambiguity,summarizes its historical development history,and concisely illustrates the research emphasis and significance of this paper.The first chapter analyzes racial ambiguity in characters of mixed-race and racial ambiguity in characters of single-race in this novel,by making use of Homi Bhabha's “unhomeliness” and “mimicry” as well as Karen Horney's theory of character neurosis,to disclose the negative impacts of racial ambiguity,especially to blacks,which results in their failure to find the self.Then,the focus of the part shifts to the ethical ambiguity.The second chapter discusses the ambiguity in family ethics and the ambiguity in interpersonal ethics from the perspective of literary ethic criticism and finds out that due to the negative influence of racial ambiguity,people's ethics and morality have also appeared ambiguous.That is to say,racial ambiguity makes people's whole relationships,such as family relationships,interpersonal relationships,go wrong,and resulting in black people's failure to find a path to ethics.Finally,this chapter attempts to analyze the ambiguity in narrative to demonstrate that Morrison deliberately uses vague narrative techniques to highlight the subject of “ambiguity” and to disclose black people's plight of identity uncertainty.In the light of Genette's narrative theory,this chapter analyzes ambiguity from narrative time and narrative focalizations.In conclusion,ambiguity is an important cause of the degeneration and deconstruction of black people.It results that the black individual can not find the self,and black community can not find the direction of salvation.In order to highlight this theme,Morrison deliberately designs the narrative of the novel also full of ambiguity,not only in order to arouse the attention of the majority of readers,but also to uncover black people's identity crisis because of ambiguity.