Analyzing characters in the Bluest Eye

Pecola Breedlove:

• protagonist of the novel
• eleven-year-old 
• black girl 
• believes that she is ugly
• having blue eyes would make her beautiful
• Sensitive
• delicate
• passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates
•  lonely
• imaginative

It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.

Claudia MacTeer:

• independent
• strong-minded 
• nine-year-old
• fighter
• rebels against adults

“It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding. We had dropped our seeds in our own little plot of black dirt just as Pecola’s father had dropped his seeds in his own plot of black dirt. Our innocence and faith were no more productive than his lust or despair.”

 We had defended ourselves since memory against everything and everybody, considered all speech a code to be broken by us, and all gestures subject to careful analysis; we had become headstrong, devious, and arrogant. Nobody paid us any attention, so we paid very good attention to ourselves. Our limitations were not known to us—not then.

Love is never any better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe. There is no gift for the beloved. The lover alone possesses his gift of love. The loved one is shorn, neutralized, frozen in the glare of the lover’s inward eye.

Cholly Breedlove:

• Pecola’s father
• impulsive
• violent
• free (but in a dangerous ways)

Pauline (Polly) Breedlove:

• Pecola’s mother
• believes that she is ugly
• lonely and cold
• deformed foot 
•  terrible marriage
•  her work caring for a well-to-do white family

Frieda MacTeer:

• Claudia’s ten-year-old sister
• vulnerable to her community’s equation of whiteness with beauty
• knowledgeable about the adult world 
• sometimes braver than Claudia

Narrative Structure / The Bluest Eye

Everything tends to have a structure, when we think about it. We know that authors such as Toni Morrison have a gift to entertain their audience. He knows very well how to build up his order of events so he can have engage his audience at all times. We know that he follows the typical structure, exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and finally the resolution. Toni Morisson at the biggining of this novel The Bluest Eye introduces various points of view  to the reader and like this he triggers the readers curiosity. Going on he introduces characters by telling us their behaviors and suggest why they act the way the act. All though we might think he doesn't follow the general plot structure he plays around with the chronological structure by going from the past to the present and so on. This makes it more entertaining since the reader will notice that he/ she must be paying attention, like this they won't get lost. To wrap up the narrative structure takes part in many novels such as this one mentioned before, one must remember that the narrative structure is all about the order of events, point of view, conflict development,  and last but not least resolution.