ENGL 25640 The Problem of Fictional Character

University of Chicago

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The impact of narrative authority on character in The Bluest Eye

February 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

I found the chapter on Pauline Breedlove particularly interesting to consider in relation to the following chapter on her husband. The narration in the chapter on Pauline is comprised in part by her own reconstruction of her memories, which are set apart from the voice of the narrator in italicized direct quotes. It feels almost like an interview, in which Pauline is given the opportunity to talk about her past. The very explicit use of italicization and quotation marks to separate her words from those of the narrator seem to function to remind the readers that these memories are only her recollection and representation of the past. However, the narration in the following chapter on Cholly does not quote him and instead relies on free indirect discourse to embed his interiority into the voice of the narrator to imbue Cholly and his story with a sense of narratorial authority that Pauline was not given. We learn that Cholly hated Darlene only because his subconscious knew that directing his hatred towards the white men would have consumed him, and while having an explanation does not make the action any less inexcusable, we are told the emotions and thoughts that lead him to rape his own daugther. This is in contrast to how Pauline tells us that sometimes she would catch herself beating her children and feel sorry for them, but she “couldn’t seem to stop.” (124) The narrator does not allow for the same level of immediate sympathy as she does for Cholly, as we are never told explicitly why Pauline can’t stop beating her own children. The difference in how these two chapters lead us to think about their protagonists raises an interesting question as to how character is constructed in the novel and, more broadly, in fiction. We can only understand characters to the extent that the narrator understands them, so how can we realize characters as individuals of their own?

The Bluest Eyes and narrative shifts

February 14, 2018 / / 1 Comment

The Bluest Eyes and narrative shifts

 

 

The Bluest Eyes keeps shifting the point of view of the narration, through various mechanisms, either through a different narrator or a change in the focalization. If the first part kept mostly to Claudia and an omniscient narrator’s perspective, the second part of the novel is less sparse in using these kinds of devices, as we are made aware of both of Pecola’s parents’ stories – Polly through a first-person narrative like a journal, intertwined with the omniscient narrator’s account, and Cholly through his own internal focalization. We are even invited into Pecola’s mind, in a strange dialogue with an unnamed “friend” (who might be understood as a form of Pecola’s subconscious). In a novel that questions the subjective view of beauty, showing multiple accounts and perspective serves to create and question a previously fixed understanding of what beauty can contain. There is no clear and definite perspective on beauty, and it translates in the form of a wavering identity; there is a clear vocabulary of stripping oneself of everything once the self is viewed through the lens of beauty: Polly experiences it both when she take on the standard of beauty for herself – “in equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap” (122) – and when she gives it up – “Everything went. Look like I just didn’t care no more after that.” The clear dichotomy between “after” and “before” (196) getting blue eyes – or, the equivalent of becoming beautiful – is soon blurred by the unnamed voice who plants seeds of doubts in Pecola’s mind, forcing her to continue her quest – until the last image of her, “searching the garbage” (206).

Dual Personas in Internal Monologue

February 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Even before the reader encounters Pecola’s italicized conversation with her imaginary friend, the introductory lines at the top of the page already set this section of the book apart. Unlike for previous paragraphs, it fully ends with “…PLAYJANEPLAY” (195). This definitive ending mirrors how Pecola, in her mind, has reached her desired end: the attainment of pretty blue eyes. However, by the end of the book, Pecola has fractured into two distinct voices, a tragedy considering how she never truly had a voice to call her own in the first place. Although portrayed as a conversation between her and her imaginary friend, this part of the novel can also be read as an internal monologue that portrays Pecola’s deterioration, but also the sheer velocity with which Pecola herself drives this deterioration. Even within a conversation of her own creation, Pecola fails to stop ruminating upon her worries considering Cholly and Sammy, but especially her blue eyes and whether they are the bluest eyes of them all.  She accuses the voice of being jealous, and promptly apologizes, questioning how she never saw this friend when she was “Right before my eyes” (196), to which the friend responds, “No, honey. Right after your eyes” (196). In some ways, this dual, splintered persona is more knowledgeable than Pecola herself, almost reminiscent of Bechdel’s relationship with Alison. However, she does little to aid Pecola in reconstructing her sense of self and her narrative; rather, she further propels Pecola’s deterioration, playing the “good game.”

Relative Desire and Character Relationships

February 14, 2018 / / 0 Comments

While Bluest Eye is seriously concerned with how gender, race, and class can effect a the self-esteem of someone in Pecola’s situation, it also depicts a parallel process whereby she becomes a foil for other people’s self-esteem. Indeed, we can read self esteem as an interpretation of one’s own desirability (or ugliness as Pecola sees it) as mediated through their social, or in this case, narrative world. During one of the narrator’s few moments of earnest self-reflection she says, “We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (205). Morrison makes this interplay of desire among social relations a focus of her narrative but I think it’s fair to say that this matrix of status, desire, and esteem can be identified in most of the novels we have read. Even if characters do not expressly orient themselves towards one another as Claudia and Freda do, we can determine their politics of desire from how they are individually characterized and how they interact as and towards each other’s characters. In the afterward, Morrsion tells us her process  began with Pecola and then she added friends to build the world around her and this shows in the novel’s relatively hands off (or outside in) perspective which simultaneously characterizes several narrators, their desires, and their relationships and develops Pecola’s through interplay and description mediated by these character’s relationships.

Pecola’s Interiority as an External Entity

February 14, 2018 / / 2 Comments

Throughout this novel, Pecola has been described to us through the people around her. We know only a few things about her by her own telling; we know that she loves Shirley Temple, that she wants to disappear because her home life is pretty horrible, and that she wants blue eyes. In the last chapter section of the book, we see the closest thing that resembles Pecola’s inner monologue and thoughts: her conversation with an imaginary friend. This conversation is at times conflicting and at other times self-assuring. Her imaginary friend switches from telling Pecola how lovely her new blue eyes are to making her feel worried that someone else has bluer ones.  First the imaginary friend says, “They are the prettiest I’ve ever seen” (201), but then a few lines later she says, “Well, I am sure. Unless… Oh nothing. I was just thinking about a lady I saw yesterday. Her eyes sure were blue” (202). She also repeatedly brings up what Cholly did to Pecola: “How could somebody make you do something like that?…He made you didn’t he?” (198-199).  I think we can take this imaginary friend as a way for Pecola to maybe shed some of the conflicting thoughts she has about herself and about her father. By doing this, they are no longer her problematic thoughts but the teasings of a friend. It’s like she has split herself in two: herself and all the stuff she’d rather not think about. The end of this conversation, where Pecola’s imaginary friend says that she’s leaving for a while, is so sad to me, but I am not quite sure what to make of it. It’s so heartbreaking when Pecola keeps asking if the reason her friend is leaving is because her “eyes aren’t blue enough” (204). I am not quite sure why her imaginary friend decides to leave, and what this means concerning Pecola’s psyche. The title of this section implies that this is Pecola’s only friend, and now she doesn’t have anyone, not even really herself.

Charged descriptive language in The Bluest Eye

February 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

On page 31, describing the Breedloves, Morrison writes”Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique”. Toni Morrison does two things in this section- she claims that the ugliness of the Breedloves is external to them and only exists from their conviction to it, and yet she writes that it is very much real, and lists physical, (seemingly) nonnegotiable characteristics with visible negative implications that construct something non-beautiful. She writes that they have “the eyes, the small eyes set closely together under narrow foreheads. The low, irregular hairlines… high cheekbones, and their ears turned forward.” Deconstruction of description lets us see that each of these says little about the Breedloves, and much about the function of comparative language in influencing perception. The “small eyes” and  “narrow foreheads” only exist in contrast to a set regular size; “low, irregular hairlines” again sets a trait against a standard (and Morrison even throws in the word “regular” here); “high cheekbones, and their ears turned forward” are the most ridiculous – the function of the cheekbones are to be raised above the face and ears are meant to be turned forward.

The implications of charged descriptive language creating reality has not only racial implications, but ties into construction of character. If we accept language as a way to view the invisible, and we also believe language exists comparatively, can we ever construct character without reflecting on a normal, and if we do, can we ever correctly construct a minority character when the normal is defined by one in the majority? She writes, “Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove – wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them” – the perception is created external to the character itself.

 

Self-Awareness and Self Worth in The Bluest Eye

February 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

In the opening chapters of The Bluest Eye, I was struck by the way the characters’ self-awareness and senses of self worth are dominated by guilt surrounding race, gender, and appearance. From the first moment of Claudia’s narration, the italicized section of the prologue, we get a sense of her mind as one that seems to default towards guilt. She describes the fall of 1941, when she and her sister were unable to grow marigolds, writing “for years I thought my sister was right: it was my fault. I had planted them too far down in the earth. It never occurred to either of us that the earth itself might have been unyielding.” This tendency to blame herself and put herself down appears throughout the section we read today, and it is a quality that Pecola seems to share, particularly with regard to her appearance. Both characters project their feelings towards white girls onto inanimate objects that are supposed to represent beauty. Claudia takes her anger (and perhaps jealousy) of white girls out on the dolls she destroys, and Pecola projects her longing to achieve white standards of beauty by compulsively drinking milk out of the Shirley Temple mug. Pecola’s self-awareness is inhibited by this longing—she upsets Claudia and Frieda’s mother by inadvertently drinking three entire quarts of milk just to “handle and see sweet Shirley’s face” (23). Later, the three girls feel so guilty and afraid of Mama’s anger that when Pecola gets her period, their first instinct is to hide it from their mother.

Personalization of the Different Narrative Point Of Views

February 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

Pecola seems to be the central character, yet Claudia’s narration is the only narration done through the first-person. The novel changes from Claudia’s first person perspective to what seems to be an omniscient third-person. The ways in which the shifts in narration allows for a rendering of Pecola that is both intimate yet impersonal. Meaning that the third-person narratives of Pecola seem to prescribe a systemic disorder to her. Without Pecola’s interiority, the narration’s telling of her ugliness- “it was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had accepted it without question (39)” seems so pervasive. Her ugliness seems to be a root of and consequence for her unstable family and a rotting home. The third-person perspective seems so cynical. And things seem to happen to her and people say things to her, but she’s not a very present force in her life. In fact, she often pretends to disappear (45).

However, the Claudia’s first person perspective feels like a more intimate relationship (or character construction) of Pecola. We find out she loves Shirley Temple, she gets her period, we see Maureen link arms with her while going to the ice cream place. We get instances of people engaging with her as a person instead of as a vessel of ugliness at which people want to prod. Though Claudia’s perspective seems to be tinged with pitiless, it still feels as though Pecola is human. Her moments of belonging seem to be emphasized more through Claudia’s perspective whereas her moments of difference/isolation seem to be highlighted more in the third-person perspective.

 

Relating to Others: A Form of Self-Expression

February 12, 2018 / / 0 Comments

A main technique used by the narrator, Claudia,  in telling her own story and establishing her identity is the relation to and contrast with other characters. She makes herself singular by contrasting her ideas on beauty, race, and self-worth with the adults and children around her, and establishes a perspective of alienated and disdainful observations from the beginning. At times her tone borders on contempt, at others simply observational- throughout it all however, it is interesting to see how she categorizes her own feelings based on the reactions that those around her have. Her articulations of this very human and relatable process are more stylized, and result in an inner world of complex turmoil that do not reflect outwardly. Her solitude is reflected in her observation of others, as she focuses on points others may not: “Each member of the family in his own cell of consciousness… collecting fragments of experience here, pieces of information there. From the tiny impressions gleaned from one another, they created a sense of belonging and tried to make do with the way they found each other.” (34) While this is reminiscent of Allison’s musings in Fun Home, this quote holds a longing tone that shows a mindset that is attempting to assimilate rather than begrudge. Overall, the structure in which these thoughts are set up allow room for drastic development.

Shaped by appearance

February 12, 2018 / / 1 Comment

A vicious cycle began when Pecola, as a member of the ugly Breedloves family, was convinced by others’ judgement of her as ugly, but then the ugliness lied not in her appearance but rather in her lack of confidence, or rather, realization of her beauty, so that her internal conception of self was projected to her exterior, confirming people’s view. Her obsession of blue eyes — “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (p.46) — showed how she accepted people’s impression of her and even managed to justify their accounts by attributing her ugliness to her eyes. Curiously, while taking others’ impression as a starting point to shape her personalities to others’ expectation, she was convinced that by having blue eyes, she could in some way flip the situation and start to influence others, for example, stopping her parents’ fights. She was aware that there was something missing in her and knew what caused her ugliness was the hindrance to actively participating in human interactions, but she identified the key to the problem as her eyes, a thing that she learned from those who first put the label of ugliness in her. Yet so far the book had not put forward a particular character or a certain group of characters who “taught” Pecola about her ugliness, while people could easily recognize it and Pecola herself treating it as if it was natural.

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