Why It's So Difficult to Read "The Bluest Eye"

Reading The Bluest Eye is so difficult for me to read, because it is so passionate and vivid in conveying its ideas.  It makes the characters very unlikeable, but it is so tough to dislike any of them (except for Maureen) because they have all had problematic pasts.

I wanted to scream at Pauline Breedlove for yanking her daughter “up by the arm” (Morrison 109) and slapping her when Pecola accidentally knocked a pie over. I mean, seriously, it’s just a pie. She “abused Pecola directly” (109) because of a pie. Pauline can always “’make another pie’” (109). Later on, though, I forgive her a little because she was taken to the north with Cholly where even the colored folks were “no better than whites for meanness” (117) and she was lonely all the time with only arrogant people who disregarded her. I also felt sorry for her when she couldn’t get money for her work and Cholly would stay away from her whenever he got a chance. But then some of my dislike came back when she began to neglect her “ugly” (126) family and admired the life of a “well-to-do family” (127).

I wanted to strangle Geraldine for putting the cat “first in her affections” (86) before her child. It is not healthy for a child to grow up with a mother who will “not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). Junior was her first child born out of her own flesh and blood, and she just ignores that. After our class discussion, I understood that she was sexually abused by her husband, but that still isn’t a very good reason to hate her own child. He still is a part of her, and she should take care of her own offspring.

Anyway, no matter how much I dislike the characters or forgive the characters, I still have to continue reading this book. It’s a good moral for life also, with not judging people before you know their story. Everybody has a background that makes them act a certain way.

This is a blue eye. I have no idea why this book is called The Bluest Eye and not The Bluest Eyes because quite frankly, only having one blue eye is a bit strange.