ABSTRACT
Morrison's first novel, The Bluest Eye (I970), demonstrates her commitment to inventing a novelistic form that meets the needs of the specific story. This story of the Breedlove family brims with their loathing of their own poverty, powerlessness, ugliness, and blackness. The family is unlovable and unloving. Pecola prays for the blue eyes she believes will make her beautiful and loved and transform her world. Morrison uses a complex narrative point of view, moving between the perspective offered by the child-narrator Claudia, various first-person narrators, and an anonymous third-person omniscient narrator. In this way, Morrison creates a vivid picture of the black community of Lorain, Ohio, and the past and present experiences of the main characters, as well as a bitingly critical and ironic perspective, as the adult Claudia re-creates her youthful innocence and lack of understanding. The narrative contains no suspense-all is given at the beginning: Pecola's rape by her father, the death of her baby, her madness. The novel asks not "what?" but "how?" and takes the form of recollection in order to encourage analysis on the part of the reader.
