Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye”
The central clue of the story is the experience of an 11-year-old black girl named Pekra Bridlav, whose family is burdened with a heavy burden: when you see them, you will be surprised how they look like this Ugly, you may not find the reason, and then you will realize that it is because of what sin they committed and God’s punishment for them. It seemed that the Almighty God gave each of them an “ugly cloak”, and they reluctantly accepted…They took the cloak in their hands and wore it around the world. There is nothing in the world uglier than their looks, and poor little Pekra belongs to such an alien. She was ridiculed, beaten and scolded, and finally raped by her father and became pregnant. Because of this, Pecola’s mother beat her brutally, and the “Savior of Faith” at the Supuheide Church also betrayed her. Since then, Pecola has gone crazy, and she is convinced that she has blue eyes that have gone both ways.
In the novel, Toni Morrison pictured the stories about Pecola’s mother and father. From their stories, we learned that they all suffered a lot in their lives. Toni Morrison seems to tell us they are also victims of the society, of the racial discrimination. Victims are also offenders. They are the offenders to their daughter. While in the novel, what we do not see is Pecola’s complaints, Pecola’s crying for her miserable life. Pecola is silent. Silence is a kind power more than crying. Her silence touched me a lot and made me want to cry for her. She was silent and she told much. Her crying was so loud and so penetrating that daunted around my ears for days. The power of silence reminded me of 80 thousand people in Hongkong demonstrating for 8 persons who were killed in Philippines in 2010. They were silent, instead of crying. 80 thousand people’s silence has more power than 80 thousand people’s crying.
Toni Morrison is merciless, so merciless to Pecola. At the end of the novel, she made Pecola’s dream for the bluest eye come true at the cost of her clear mind. Pecola finally had the bluest eye, but sadly, she found that people still did not love her. She wondered the reason why the situation did not change as she thought, as she learned, as she was told. She wondered that maybe the color was still not the bluest. She still believed the bluest eye is the root of her misery. “No, Pecola, no,” I desire to cry to her, “It is not your problem. It is the problem of the racism, of the society, of the country, of the world.” While she could not hear me, even if she could hear me, she would not listen to me. Her mind had been polluted by the wrong awareness of beauty. She and many black people like her had been brainwashed by the White.
Tony Morrison is like a magician, combining different voices and organizing them into different characters, instead of bluntly squeezing his opinions to readers. She wants readers to truly walk into the novel during the reading process, and taste the joys and pains of the protagonist’s life and the mystery of the inner world with her. It was a black girl’s dream of a beautiful life in a world full of ugliness, discrimination, and bullying, under the temptation of “blue eyes” from another world.