An Impressionistic View of the Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison's book The Bluest Eye was a book that this author had to force himself to finish reading. The book has meritorious literary and social worth, but is lacking somewhere that no book should. The book lacks a real plot and character development, has no satisfying resolution and has very few likable characters. For these reasons it is not a particularly enjoyable book.

Where The Bluest Eye suffers most is its lack of a really cohesive plot. Yes, we understand that Pecola Breedlove wishes her eyes were blue, but there is no way in the book that she goes about attempting to obtain that. Aside from the occasional mention of her longing for eyes of a different color ("It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes [...] were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.") there is little in the way of a plot about Pecola attempting to affect change in her life.

The book introduces several characters, but does little to develop any of them. This writer can't help but feel that he is looking at a snapshot of these people. Several characters have relatively brief sections of the book giving some history but for the rest of the book they remain fairly stagnant. Pecola Breedlove is the only character to have any notable development throughout the book, and even then she doesn't do much until the end of the book, when she goes crazy.

As a rule of thumb, the characters in The Bluest Eye are not very likeable. Cholly is an alcoholic rapist, Mrs. Breedlove is abusive, and Geraldine is aloof, frigid, domineering and instills fear into her children. Some may even go as far as to call her evil. It seems that the children are the only characters that are remotely likeable, and even then it is more due to the lack of negative vices than it is to the presence of virtues.

The end of The Bluest Eye is one of the most disappointing I have ever read. Pecola Breedlove does receive some closure in the form of insanity. Unfortunately, this does very little for the reader. Indeed the story ends with Pecola going crazy and everyone dismissing her as a crazy pregnant girl, who ends up dying young. There is not much resolution there at all. What's worse is that this is the most resolution we get. Most of the other characters just get a paragraph or two about what they end up doing.

Indeed, The Bluest Eye is a good book in the literary sense that is virtually undisputed.