In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the story is told through the eyes of Claudia MacTeer. Claudia and her sister, Frieda, live with their parents. The two MacTeer girls befriend Pecola Breedlove.

The lives of the MacTeer girls are completely different from Pecola’s. The MacTeers are caring, protective, and loving parents. By contrast, Pecola has a difficult life that is filled with fear, uncertainty, and unpleasantness. She is a prime example of a character that has experienced the “loss of innocence" at a young age.

First, her father is abusive. As the story advances, he rapes her. Then, when her father burns down the Breedlove house, Pecola has to stay with the MacTeer family temporarily.

Claudia, the narrator, refers to Pecola as “a girl who had no place to go.” Moreover, “that old Dog Breedlove had burned up his house, gone upside his wife's head, and everybody, as a result, was outdoors. Outdoors, we knew, was the real terror of life.” So Pecola lives in terror, fearful of her father, his wrath, his drunken actions, and his sexual advances. She gets no protection from her mother, and then, when the family is homeless, she is placed in someone else’s home.

The MacTeer girls also experience the loss of innocence, as they become aware of the problems and evil that exists in the world around them, particularly those that affect Pecola.

While perhaps they do not fully understand the rape Pecola endures by her father, they know that she becomes homeless and has few friends in the world. They also know that Pecola becomes pregnant, which makes her life even more difficult than it was. Moreover, through Pecola, they also meet her neighbors: Miss Marie, who goes by the name “the Maginot Line”; China; and Poland. These women are prostitutes. Although perhaps the girls do not quite understand what the prostitutes do for a living, they realize that their mother would not approve of them.

Moreover, the MacTeers have a boarder, Henry Washington. One day, a crying Frieda reveals to her family that he has touched her inappropriately. There are whispers between the parents and neighbors that Frieda might be "ruined." Although neither Frieda nor Claudia understands what that means, they recognize how upsetting what has happened to Frieda is.

The most obvious factor that contributes to Pecola's loss of innocence is the fact that she is the victim of rape, having been assaulted by her own father, Cholly. This was made even worse by the fact that her mother, Pauline, did not believe Pecola when she told her what happened. When she becomes pregnant, Pecola eventually loses her baby, so she suffers further loss through the loss of her child—someone she could potentially have loved. 

Another is in the fact that Pecola has such a strong desire for blue eyes. As a young black girl living in Ohio post-Great Depression, she has come to think her blackness is ugly, while white girls, like Shirley Temple, are the ideal of beauty. The fact that at such a young age, she is wishing for blue eyes like a white woman might have, shows that she is very aware of how negatively white society of her time views her. She has not been allowed to have a carefree childhood in any way, not even allowed to think she might be beautiful. 

We can also see how abusive familial situations often grow from parents having lost their innocence at a young age as well. For example, when Cholly was young, he had a relationship with a girl named Darlene. Cholly and Darlene are caught having sex by two white men. The men force them to continue while they laugh, and thus this sexual experience becomes a traumatic one for both Cholly and Darlene. 

In addition to the great response above that has much to do with the physical and/or sexual loss of innocence, the characters also experience the loss of innocence through self and societal perceptions.  For example, early in the novel, Claudia says that she hates little white baby dolls because people love them.  She furthers this by saying that she also hates Shirley Temple because Temple is seen as the quintessential little girl.  Claudia realizes that she, her sister, and other little girls in her neighborhood look nothing like Temple or little white baby dolls, and Claudia must resist feeling like she is not as worthy as little white girls.  Children in their innocence should feel like they are special and beautiful; however, Claudia has lost this because societal perceptions tell her otherwise.