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When Adults Fail, Children Change Essay

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The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison that reveals many lessons and conflicts between young and adult characters of color. The setting takes place during the 1940s in Lorain, Ohio. The dominant speaker of this book is a nine year old girl named Claudia MacTeer who gets to know many of her neighbors. As a result of this, Claudia learns numerous lessons from her experience with the citizens of Lorain. Besides Claudia, The Bluest Eye is also told through many characters for readers to understand the connection between each of the adults and children. Many parents in the novel like Geraldine and Pauline Breedlove clearly show readers how adults change their own children. Furthermore, other adult characters like Cholly Breedlove …show more content…

As he grew older, he learned how to direct his hatred to the cat and spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86).
Junior is affected by the failure of his mother to parent well. Instead she worries about appearance, cleanliness, and her cat which brings separation between her and Junior. Because he is angry and hurt by this, he abuses his mother’s cat who receives all the affection he would like to have from Geraldine.
Another example of the failure of adults is seen in Pauline Breedlove. Just as Geraldine focuses more on her desires than her child, so does Pauline in ways that also drift her away from her family. Mrs. Breedlove is a black woman who dreams she can somehow make her family appreciate her but after Pauline figures that she could not, she finds meaning in romantic movies and the Fisher Family - the white family she works for. The narrator tells readers, “More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man – they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. . .Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” (127). Pauline Breedlove works for a family that is not her family and because the Fishers give her what she desires, she ends up neglecting her own family. Mrs. Breedlove fails to

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