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The Bluest Eye


            The Bluest Eye, written in 1940 by Toni Morrison, is constructed to reveal a very powerful point that applies not only to the book, but also to many societies of the present day. Morrison's argument is how society can greatly influence a person and how firmly a societies views and ideas can be almost forced on that person. The ideas and views present in The Bluest Eye are related to beauty and what makes one beautiful. The tragedy of Pecola Breedlove beautifully illustrates how this facade of beauty can dishevel one's life until finally leading one to madness. Thus, Morrison demonstrates to the reader what a negative effect society's stubborn ideas and views can have on a person and how those views and ideas can change a persons life forever. .
             In the opening of The Bluest Eye, the passage from the Dick and Jane story, becomes a representation of an ideal white person's life. The race of the Dick and Jane family is never stated in the story, but the reader automatically thinks of a happy, carefree, and white family. The perfect white world of the Dick and Jane story becomes Pecola's reverse reality. The second and third version of the Dick and Jane story take away the punctuation and then the spacing. This turns the story into a mess of nonsense becoming a parallel of Pecola's life in the story. The decline into nonsense also parallels Pecola's decline into insanity. Each repetition, by compacting the form of the sentence , speeds up the pace at which it must be read. One tends to rush through the last repetition, hardly understanding what one read. Pecola holds on as tight as possible to the standards of the white world to the very end, even as she begins to go insane. Her insanity is not a relief from the idealized forms of white life; her insanity causes her to feel the entire force of whites" perspective of beauty. The metaphor of the land to Pecola suggests that the soil itself might have been barren, and by relating the soil with Pecola, the land itself made growth impossible for the marigold flowers, just as society and situations make growth physically and mentally impossible for Pecola in America.


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