The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

The author introduces Pecola’s ironic views on blue eyes early in the novel to convey the idea that sometimes love and beauty is unfairly only reserved for those who are white. Throughout the The Bluest Eye, a young African-American girl named Pecola Breedlove is constantly described as “ugly” by other characters, including her own mother. Toni Morrison characterizes her as an innocent, yet incredibly insecure child. Due to the insults and bullying she endures, Pecola greatly dislikes her appearance, believing “that if her eyes, those eyes that held the picture, and knew the sights--if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different… Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently,
Her yearning only increases as she imagines her mother and father loving and admiring her if she had blue eyes. Instead, she ends up bearing the brunt of many insults; Morrison expresses satire as other kids who share the same race as her also tease her for her skin color, for “it was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth. They seemed to have taken all of their smoothly cultivated ignorance, their exquisitely learned self-hatred, their elaborately designed hopelessness and sucked it all up into a fiery cone of scorn that had burned for ages in the hollows of their minds – cooled – and spilled over lips of outrage, consuming whatever was in its path” (65). As the novel progresses, Pecola continues to experience horrible events, falsely being accused of killing a woman’s cat, getting called ugly by a girl she had temporarily befriended, and getting raped by her father twice; however, she is never considered the victim. Before these occurrences leave Pecola losing her sanity, she visits a man called Soaphead Church, who finally makes her believe her wish has come true, that she has blue