The Bluest Eye - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a prologue relating a paragraph-long Dick and Jane tale in which none of Jane's family will agree to play with her until a friend comes along at last. The tale is then repeated two times, each time with less punctuation or fewer spaces between words, until finally all the words are squashed together.

The novel is alternately narrated in first-person by Claudia MacTeer and in third-person omniscient, focusing on various other characters. 9-year-old Claudia and her 10-year-old sister, Frieda, live in Lorain, Ohio with their parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house has been burned down by her wildly unstable father, who is widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, and whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually being told and reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is, thus fueling her desire to be white with blue eyes.

Pecola appears to have thoughts contrary to Claudia, who is given a white baby doll to play with and, though frequently told how lovely it is, despises and spitefully dismantles it. Unlike Pecola, Claudia resists the white racial standard in her society, is aggressive and determined, and has a strict but ultimately stable family. While living in the MacTeer household, Pecola experiences menarche, bringing up the first of the book's many themes of sexuality and adulthood. Likewise, ideas of beauty, particularly those relating to racial and class characteristics, are a major theme in this book. Insults or praises toward physical appearance are often given in racial terms. For example, a high yellow student named Maureen Peal is shown favoritism at school. Claudia and Frieda initially feel a confusing mixture of both hatred and attraction toward Maureen. They finally befriend her after they all stumble upon Pecola being bullied by a group of boys and are able to dissolve the confrontation. However, Maureen herself immediately then insults Pecola regarding rumors about her father and the MacTeer girls furiously chase Maureen away in Pecola's defense.

Throughout the novel, it is revealed through flashbacks that not only Pecola but also her dysfunctional parents had a life as young people full of hatred and hardships. Her mother, Pauline, feels alive and happy only when she is working for a rich, white family who affectionately call her "Polly." Pecola's father, Cholly, is a drunk who was left to live with his aunt when he was young but later ran away to find his father, who ended up wanting nothing to do with him. Equally troubling to Cholly as a young man was his loss of virginity, interrupted by a pair of voyeuristic white men who humiliatingly forced Cholly to continue having sex in their presence, while jeering at him. By the time of the story's current setting, the adult Pauline and Cholly have by now both lost the tender and affectionate love they once had for each other in their youth.

Another motif is a contrast in the novel between the world shown through cinema and the one in which Pauline is a servant, as well as the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant society and the existence the main characters live in. Most chapters' titles are extracts from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola's; perhaps to incite discomfort, the chapter titles contain much sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.

One day while Pecola is doing dishes, her intoxicated father rapes her. His motives are unclear, seemingly a combination of both love and hate. Cholly flees after the second time he rapes Pecola, leaving her pregnant. Claudia and Frieda are the only two in the community that hope for Pecola's child to survive. Consequently, they give up money they had been saving to buy and plant marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will live. The marigolds never bloom and Pecola's child, who is born prematurely, dies. Near the novel's end, a dialogue is presented between two sides of Pecola's own imagination, in which she indicates at strangely positive feelings about her rape by her father. In this internal conversation, Pecola speaks as though her wish has been granted: she believes that she now has blue eyes. Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may have shown Pecola the only love he could by raping her. Claudia lastly laments on her belief that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a sort of scapegoat to make themselves feel prettier and happier.