Lesson9TheBluestEye答案.doc

The Bluest Eye(Excerpts) by Toni Morrison Guide to Reading When we discuss contemporary American literature, it is impossible not to mention the name and works of Toni Morrison. A Nobel Prize winner for literature, she has written up to now seven novels, making significant contributions to the depiction of African American experience. Unlike some African American writers who expose white racism against the blacks in a direct way, Morrison’s exploration tends to be introverted, focusing on the relationships within the black community. Her novels often reveal how the dominant white culture has deprived the black people of their own cultural values and the destructive impact this cultural mutilationhas brought about among the black people. Although most of her novels are apparently set in her home town in Ohio, they not only depict the black experience in that region, but tell about shared human conditions with universal themes of love, death, betrayal, and the individual’s responsibility for his or her own fate. Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye, from which the following text is taken, tells the heartbreaking story of Pecola Breedlove, a vulnerable black girl, living in Lorain, Ohio, in the early 1940s. In a society where blue eyes and whiteness are equated with beauty, and therefore, goodnessand happiness while blackness is perceivedugliness, Pecola’s greatest desire is to have blue eyes. Each night, without fail, she prays for pretty blue eyes. She believes that having blue eyes is the key to wiping out all the unbearable miseries for her family—their hopeless poverty, the constant fighting between the parents, the contempt of other children, etc. She imagines that with blue eyes, she will become a beautiful girl loved by everyone. In her wildimagination Pecola feels that the color of her eyes has been finally transformed. Ironically, instead of love, what she gets in the end is the violence of her father’s rape. Rather than happiness, she sinks deeper into the