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The Bluest Eye Analysis

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Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old black girl in Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, combats with self love and self image throughout the entire novel. Her only wish is to be loved and adored, and she believes the only route to that destination is to simply be more “white”. Throughout her journey in Morrison’s masterpiece, she attempts to transform herself into an idealistic version of herself, but she ultimately discovers that she is physically unable to attain what she had hoped for and is driven to a point of madness and deep misery.

In Pecola’s early years, she was exposed to society’s ideas and “rules” on how to be beautiful and she quickly realized that at the top of this rulebook lay the most important instruction: be as white as …show more content…

Not only is Pecola obsessed with transforming her life, but she is also constantly victimized and humiliated throughout the novel which subconciousy leads to an even stronger desire to change the very essence of who she is, so she can rid herself of her past. Of all the occasions she was victimized, one stands out as the strongest– when Cholly, her own father, rapes her.

By the end of the novel, Pecola has completely lost touch with reality. She cannot process or accept the fact that her own father raped her and she becomes convinced that everyone in town is looking at her strangely because she received her wish of blue eyes. She then acquires an imaginary friend and talks to this friend exclusively about her eyes. While it may be easy to toss this off as simple insanity, that unfortunately seems a bit too easy. The true way to look at her new imaginary friend is to see it as the only way she can make sense of her experience. Because not a singe person in her life ever showed her love or adoration, Pecola's young mind does the only thing it can do: it creates an imaginary friend to love her and make her believe that fantasies have been executed. She is essentially insane at this point and has become corroded and taken over by what started as a radical self hatred and turned into pure insanity.

Other characters in the novel have their own journeys with self love and adoration, too. Pauline, Pecola's

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