Claudia: the narrator and the younger adolescent daughter of the MacTeer family, a poor black family.2. Summarize the main idea, theme, action, or event of the reading. Be sure to include quotation that best captures the overall feeling or mood of the reading.
Frieda: older adolescent sister of the MacTeer family. Although Claudia and Frieda might have their disagreements, Frieda had a close relationship with Claudia.
The Breedlove family: Another poor black family that did not live in a home, but a storefront. The family is dysfunctional. Cholly, the father was an alcoholic.
Pecola: 11 year old daughter of the Breedlove family.
Narrator #2: who was not a character in the story, but took a more mature, adult narrative role when the story began to develop on more complicated “adult” issues.
Ugly/Ugliness: Pecola believed that she was ugly. Claudia, as the narrator, identified the Breedloves to be the ugliest.
Blue Eyes: the one thing that Pecola wanted
In The Bluest Eyes, the story is about a dysfunctional family, the Breedloves, where “their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique.” Pecola was the focal character in the story.
The story began about Pecola spending a few days at the MacTeer family because Cholly Breedlove burnt down their home. In those few days, Pecola started to bleed between her legs and thought she was dying. Fortunately, Frieda was there to help Pecola through this common but confusing moment of her life. Ms. MacTeer had previously explained to Freida about ministration (menstruation). From this event, Pecola learned that she could get pregnant by somebody that loved her. However, she questioned, “How do you get somebody to love you?”
After constantly being mocked by other children and watching her parents brutally and violently attack each other, “it had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the picture, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say beautiful, she herself would be different.”
The Breedloves did not call the mother based on their relationship. They greeted her as ‘Mrs. Breedlove.’ Before she got married, she was known as Pauline Williams. She was crippled from an accident that happened when she was two years old. She was the “ninth of eleven children” where they had comfortable living accommodations in a nice house in Kentucky. Pauline essentially stayed home to take care of all the household chores and the two younger siblings. Due to her disability, she had a “general feeling of separateness and unworthiness. Restricted, as a child, to this cocoon of her family’s spinning, she cultivated quiet and private pleasures.” She met Cholly Breedlove, fell in love and got married. They decided to move “’way up north” – Lorain, Ohio, where there was “supposed to be more jobs and all.”
Cholly Breedlove was abandoned by his mother and father when he “was four days old.” His great aunt raised him and died when Cholly was 13 years old. On the day of his great aunts funeral, he encountered his first sexual experience; two white males interrupted and deeply humiliated him. “He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites.” After marrying Pauling, Cholly was not pleased with her new desires. He “commenced to getting meaner and meaner and wanted to fight me [Pauline] all the time.” Cholly began to drink more and more heavily. Mrs. Breedlove became to breadwinner of the household, but neglected caring for their home. One day, Cholly “staggered home reeling drunk” and sexually forced himself upon Pecola.
Pecola was impregnated by her father. She became an outcast of the entire town and slipped into insanity.
3. Formulate a question for discussion. The question should be relatively substantial based upon a specified passage or scene from the text, and capable of sustaining a thoughtful discussion.
What was the purpose of the narrative at the beginning of the story? The narrative begins with a brief description of a happy family living in a green and white house. The author uses simple and short sentences to describe the story, and the lines are adequately spaced in the paragraph.
The narrative is repeated. It starts with a capital letter and continues without punctuation marks. The spaces between the lines are tighter.
The narrative is repeated again. It starts with a capital letter and continues without punctuation marks. All the spaces between the words are removed. The spaces between the lines are more cramped. It becomes very difficult to read.
Was there a purpose on how the author labeled each chapter? Some chapters uses fractions of the narrative, and the text for these chapter labels are all capitalized. Also, the author labeled some chapters –autumn, winter, spring and summer.
7 comments:
Perhaps it is a psychological techinque to implant this idea of a happy family into the mind of the reader and also to convince the writer
The purpose of the narrative repeated 3 times, each time less clearly, was to show that this was her dream, and eventually it became so impossible to attain, which is why the narratives eventually became harder to read.
I think the purpose of the Season names for each chapter is to show that even with just a change of a season, life could change for you.
I think is to portray that even a happy family there is some kind of disturbance and the story gets confusing by putting all the words together. I think the author puts four parts to give each character their side of the story.
I believe the author's purpose was to show us that every season has their own stories to tell. The author repeated three short paragraphs because she wanted us to imagine the house and a happy family.
I think that by repeating the story over and over and squeezingallthewordstogether, Morrison makes the words lose all meaning. I think that she is trying to show the myth of stability and sanity within families. Morrison is a very talented writer, and is able to get her ideas clearly across in the following sections of the book, but this sets the initial tone that there is something abnormal going on.
I feel as if it was done to show us what a happy white family was like during that time. The author wanted to show how a white family who has accomplished the American Dream lives like. Then she begins to talk about her life and the reader is easily able to notice the drastic contrast between the two.
I think that the purpose of repeating three times the narrative of the happy family, is to show the reader that there are three kind of families described in this book. Each narrative is less clear than the one before, and the last one is very difficult to read. The first and well written narrative represents Junior's family, which is a family with high morals and financial stability. The second narrative represents Claudia's family, which is a middle class black family; and the third narrative represents Pecola's family, which is a poor and disfunctional family. The naming of the seasons probably represents the changes in Pecola's life.
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