The Bluest Eye
1970
- foster care
- dick and jane
- flashback
- white anglo-saxon protestants
- inferiority complex
- whiteness
- third-person narrative
- coming of age
- african american fiction
- eye
The story
Each night Pecola prayed for blue eyes. In her eleven years, no one had ever noticed Pecola. But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her. When someone finally did, it was her father, drunk. He raped her. Soon she would bear his child...
What it’s like
Dense, lyrical prose that moves in fractured fragments, with the cadence of a schoolroom primer bent out of true: sentences that repeat and stall, a child's gaze tilting toward the wrong things, and a narrator who lingers on small domestic details, a marigold, a cracked kitchen, the pale plastic of dolls and the bright clean house of a primer family. The voice is spare and close, shifting between a girl's hope and a wider, mournful chorus of neighbours, and the sensory world is one of Ohio summer heat, dust, cheap food, and the sour smell of a damp, quarrelling home. The vibe is aching and slow, a quiet dread that builds rather than shocks. Its intensity is heavy: child sexual assault and incest are central and described with unflinching weight, along with racism, cruelty, and a mother's violence; there is no gore, but the emotional harm is raw and sustained. It suits a deliberate, unhurried reading at a time when you can sit with grief, and it is for readers who want serious, formally inventive fiction about race, beauty, and childhood, and who are ready for difficult material.
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