The concept of a “house,” a place that shelters and keeps people safe, figures prominently in The Bluest Eye. In fact, the novel begins with the description of a house. It is not the house of any of the characters in the book, but rather the idealized house of the old Dick and Jane books, in which everything and everyone was perfect. This house serves as an ongoing contrast to the houses and people that populate Claudia and Frieda’s world, where poverty is an overarching concern that hangs over most families and where neither the houses nor the people resemble those described in the Dick and Jane books.

Claudia and Frieda’s house is old and cold. Pecola’s house is even further from the idyllic Dick and Jane house. Pecola’s house is a storefront that telegraphs the poverty of its inhabitants to everyone walking by. The purpose of describing the history of this house is to show how far removed it has always been from Dick and Jane’s house and to show how little the Breedloves matter, as the transience of the neighborhood and their own self-destructive actions have nearly erased all signs of their lives there. The author writes,

So fluid has the population in that area been, that probably no one remembers longer, longer ago, before the time of the gypsies and the time of the teenagers when the Breedloves lived there, nestled together in the storefront.

The Breedloves “slipped in and out” of the house, which was only a “box of peeling gray,” and did not leave an imprint of their lives, so little was their impact on their neighbors or the neighborhood. Except for the harm that they did to their daughter, Pecola, they barely mattered to one another after a while.