Haven’t we all just had so many people depending on us to live up to something that, we aren’t sure if we are capable of? In the book, Eagle Blue: A Team, a Tribe, and a High School Basketball Season in Arctic Alaska, written by Michael D’Orso, a basketball team of fourteen boys knew exactly how it felt. It is mostly breathtaking just to have that amount of pressure on you after realizing your team has won six state champions and the whole town is depending on you to win a seventh. Throughout the book, every statistic of the game had some meaning without realization.…
1. The history of the Breedloves' home is that it use to be a store. The Breedlove's lived in a store front. It is a very unattractive building within the community. "...pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it."(Morrison 33). That statement shows me that no one cared about this abandoned store. Before the store was abandoned it was a pizza parlor, a real estate office, and a gypsies base of operations. I believe that no one remembers the Breedlove's living in the store because no one ever took notice of the store also the Breedlove's were not active with in the community to be noticed by anyone. The book states that the Breedlove's did not make a wave in the mayor's office.…
The theme of the story, “The Bluest Eye” written by Toni Morrison, demonstrates the connection between the self-esteem of African-American people (beauty and ugliness), racism and hate. The reason why this theme is discussed was because, we can go back to the origins of African-Americans, it relates to the African diaspora, Jim Crow era, and how people negatively look at blacks today in society, and white supremacy destroyed black imaginary. But before this goes on furthermore, the audience needs to understand the importance of the dominant society which strongly removed the identity of African-American. Claudia and Maureen play perfect roles during the story. They show…
Planet of the BlindStephen Kuusisto is a true poet. His tale of his journey through a darkened world, is told in words that are not just written, they are painted onto the canvas that is his book. I started off full of pity for Kuusisto. He made me sad for the life that he led. I found the image of him trying to read tragic. With his descriptions, I could just picture him leaning 2 inches above a book, with one eye pointing the wrong direction, and the other jiggling back and forth in its socket. I think Kuusisto intentionally pressures the reader into feeling pity for the majority of his life story. He tries to draw you into seeing how he lived constantly in a state of despair. My heart would ache as I saw him make a fool of himself pretending to be sighted. Time an again I cried out "Just tell people! They will still love you!!!" For some reason I couldn't understand why he wouldn't let people in. Since I had such a hard time understanding it gave me a new sense of what people with disabilities go through. Their thinking must be so different from mine that I can not even imagine.…
Since the contemporary time, African American women novelists have broken down the relationship between class, gender, and race. Toni Morrison is a writer whose novels consists of this relationship. In Morrison's novels, she reveals the issues of feminism concerning African American females. In her six novels, Morrison tells the bias images of black women as powerful or powerless. In two of her works, "The Bluest Eye" and "Song of Solomon", one of the many themes are Women and Feminity and Abandonment of Women.…
A three-hundred-year history of slavery in America led to a psychological oppression of black people in America, which still exists today. Toni Morrison decides not to delineate how white dominance has affected African-Americans culturally yet she challenges American standards of white beauty and how that beauty is socially constructed within our culture. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses society’s image of beauty to demonstrate how the value of black beauty is diminished by racial prejudices and dilemmas through the lives of Pecola Breedlove, Claudia and Freida MacTeer, whose young minds were affected by this internalized idea that the color of your skin determined how perfect or worthy you were seen, not to yourself and on the inside, but…
The characters in “The Bluest Eye” are exposed to social standards and norms. The book opens with an excerpt from the book “Dick and Jane”. This excerpt represents the perfect, ideal, suburban, white family. Each chapter in the book also begins with a quote from this book. This makes the lives of the black families in the book seem worse. The comparison of Dick and Jane’s family and life to that of the black families in the book demonstrates how the black families would compare themselves to the white families. The blacks in “The Bluest Eye” feel conflicted because their self-identity does not match up with society’s social norms. An example of this is when Geraldine does everything she can to be that same as white families. She straightens her hair, uses lotion so she does not become ashy, has a steady income, and keeps in house in exceptional shape. But no matter how similar her life style is to theirs, she still does not feel as if she fits in because she knows she is black. This theme can be seen in everyday life when comparing the first and second floor cafeterias at Osbourn Park. It is more usual for white people to sit on the second floor while more colored people sit on the first floor. No one said the setup had to be that way, but it is normal for the students and it is what they are used to.…
The Bluest Eye is a novel by Toni Morrison that takes place at the end of the Great Depression in Ohio. In the novel, the MacTeer family first takes in a young boarder named Pecola Breedlove after her father Cholly has attempted to burn down the family home, but she is soon reunited with her own family despite their hardships. The MacTeer family are essential to the novel because one of the young daughters, Frieda, seems to suffer from a much less severe racism than most other characters, going as far as to destroy a white doll she is given. Cholly drinks, and Cholly and Pecola’s mother Pauline are physically abusive towards each other, leading her brother Sammy to run away from the home.…
The Bluest Eye, written in 1970, is novel by Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel and was written while she was teaching at Howard University. The Bluest Eye tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, during the hard times following the Great Depression. In this novel, Toni Morrison addresses a timeless problem of white racial dominance in the United States and points to the impact it has on the life of black females growing up in the 1930's.…
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931. She was born in Lorain, Ohio to an African-American working class family. She always had an interest in literature, and studied humanities at Howard and Cornell universities. She began her career as a novelist in 1970, gaining attention from literary critics and readers for her poetic, expressive descriptions of the Black community in America. She has been honored with numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993, which she was the first black woman to receive. Morrison’s own life influenced the novel Song of Solomon through both her personal and historic experiences. She grew up in the mid-1900s, a time when the civil rights movement was occurring, during which racism and segregation were common. The book centers around these events, and allows readers of all races to gain insight as to what life was like for an African-American of that time period. She also introduces black cultural ideas throughout the book, enhancing the readers ability to understand black America. Morrison effectively translates her own experiences with racial discrimination into this universal novel so that readers may better understand the viewpoint and culture of African-Americans, specifically during the 1950s and 1960s. On a personal level, Morrison modeled the character of Macon Dead after her grandfather, the character of Heddy after her great-grandmother, and Guitar after a mixture of her family and friends.…
The concept of rising above your self is not a difficult one, though so many people fail to do so. To rise above yourself means to overcome the problems you are facing and become a better person for yourself, which in turn will reward you with a truly fulfilling life. Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye and McCarthy, the author of All the Pretty Horses, created stories about characters that try to rise above themselves, yet are unable to do so. Through Cholly trying to escape the events of his childhood, Pecola trying to change her physical features, and John trying to prevent the dying Western culture, these characters will be unable to do so and rise above themselves.…
Beauty in the American culture has been transformed so many times most people do not even know what real beauty is. Someone can see a woman posing on a billboard in New York City and believe that she is beautiful, but who decided who and what can be beautiful. The way our culture is American people watch television, movies, internet clips constantly. People are fed images of what "beauty" is supposed to be, but this idea of beauty is from the eyes of producers, models, musicians, and actors. It seems to me that only the people who are thought to have beauty are deciding what is beautiful.…
a teenager in a field with Darlene by two white men, "never did he once consider…
After reviewing my grade on The Bluest Eye essay, I can honestly say that I did a great job considering I got 83% on the previous essay. I was more prepared and I took my time to write it. Going over the notes on the book as well as doing a little bit of research gave me the information I needed to write my essay. I noticed that my writing has improved significantly compared to where I started at the beginning of the year. On this particular essay I demonstrated several strengths in my paper as well as some weaknesses when it came to my essay as a whole.…
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18,1931 in Lorain, Ohio to George and Ramah Willis Wofford. She was the second of four children. Her parents influenced her writing because of their contrasting views. Her father had a very pessimistic view of hope for his people; however, her mother had a more positive belief that a person, with effort, could rise above African-Americans' current surroundings (Carmean 1-2). Her parents also influenced her because they were "gifted storytellers who taught their children the value of family history and the vitality of language"(Carmean 2).…