Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a novel portraying in poignant terms the tragic condition of blacks in a racist America. In her criticism of American life, she has structured her work in triadic patterns beginning with the reproduction of a passage three different times as the first three paragraphs of the work. Other triadic patterns emerge in her presentation of the tragedy of black life in relation to blacks, whites, and God or existential circumstances worked out through her thematic approach involving the problems of sex, racism, and love (or the dearth of love); in the aspect of ritual expressed through the scapegoat mechanism with the cat, the dog, and the girl, Pecola, as agents; and in the typology in the characterization affecting the three black family women—Geraldine, Mrs. MacTeer, and Mrs. Breedlove—and the three black prostitutes—The Maginot Line, China, and Poland. The pattern is concretized by the dictum that is generally accepted in the social milieu of the novel, a dictum which is clearly expressed by Calvin Hernton: "if you are white you are all right; if you are brown you can stick around; but if you are black … get back."

The opening paragraph of the novel in its simplicity and clarity could have been taken from a primer. The paragraph deals, quite ironically it turns out, with a white American ideal of the family unit—cohesive, happy, with love enough to spare to pets. It is a fairy-tale world, a dream world, childlike in extreme—it is desirable, but for man, particularly the black man, it is unattainable. (p. 112)

After the orderliness of the first paragraph, the same passage is reproduced as the second paragraph but without punctuation marks. The lack of punctuation shows some disorder in a world that could be orderly; however, the world is still recognizable….

The third paragraph is a repetition of the first but without punctuation and without world division, and it demonstrates the utter breakdown of order among the Breedloves. Thus we have three possible family situations: first Geraldine's (a counterfeit of the idealized white family), further down the MacTeers', and at the bottom the Breedloves'. They are all manifestations of the social concept of the family, just as the first three paragraphs are identical except that circumstances have changed the premise implicit in the ideal of the first paragraph. The Mother-Father-Dick-Jane concept is finally transmuted to the Mrs. Breedlove-Cholly-Sammy-Pecola situation. The transmutation is Morrison's indirect criticism of the white majority for the black family's situation and for what is taught to the black child in school, as evidenced by the primer paragraph, that in no way relates to the child's reality. The black man is attacked emotionally from childhood, living in two impossible worlds: the fairy tale world of lies when he is in contact with the white world and the equally incredible, grim world of black life.

The first section of The Bluest Eye, "Autumn," opens with a sentence which reflects the disorder and moral chaos of the novel: "Nuns go by as quiet as lust, and drunken men with sober eyes sing in the lobby of the Greek hotel" (emphasis added). Here "nuns" with an appropriate attribute, "quiet," are juxtaposed to "lust," a word not usually associated with nuns. Furthermore, the "drunken men" "sing" (a not unusual event) but their eyes are surprisingly "sober." The sentence opens up a strange world, one where expectations remain unfulfilled and contradictions are rife. These incongruities exist either because of man's oppression of irresponsibility against man or else because of existential circumstances. (p. 113)

The Bluest Eye has a structural resemblance to Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain. Just as Baldwin does not deal only with John, the protagonist, so Morrison does not deal only with Pecola. She is the centripetal force bringing all the different characters together, as John does in Go Tell It on the Mountain. (p. 114)

In handling the narrative, Morrison has put her literary heritage to very good use. One notices the influence of black writers in her arrangement and her material. Cholly's terrible life is in the tradition of Ellison's Trueblood. His surname, Breedlove, becomes an irony, since, deprived of love by his parents and society at large, he is expected to cultivate love. (p. 115)

Running through the novel is the theme of the scapegoat: Geraldine's cat, Bob the dog, and Pecola are the scapegoats supposed to cleanse American society through their involvement in some violent rituals. Pecola is associated with the black cat with blue eyes, whose eyes in the moment of death were transformed into "blue streaks of horror."… (p. 116)

Most characters in the novel are made typical, as are Geraldine, Mrs. MacTeer, and Mrs. Breedlove. Geraldine has been cast as an old black bourgeoisie; Hernton's description tallies with her role in the novel: "[They] share the same contempt and stereotyped views about 'lower-class' Negroes as the outer society. And when it comes to sex, the orthodox middle-class Negro woman is far more rigid, repressed, and neurotic than any other female in America." Her attitude towards lower-class blacks is dramatized in her brief encounter with Pecola when she permits her venom to erupt. (p. 118)

Another strong point in the novel is the intricate weaving of Pecola through the plot and her portrayal as a scapegoat with its implicit ambivalence. In the plot, however, Morrison ran into some difficulties with Pecola; although she tried to establish in two sentences a genetic factor for Pecola's madness, one feels the madness is a deus ex machina. One has a feeling that Morrison has fictionalized those sociological factors discussed in Hernton's Sex and Racism in America without first distancing herself enough from that work. (pp. 119-20)

[For] a first novel The Bluest Eye is appealing. In her simplicity of style and sentence structure, Morrison sometimes recalls Hemingway; with the themes of blindness, invisibility, incest, racism, she belongs to the tradition of Ellison; in the structure of the work she suggests Baldwin. What she has done, in essence, is to present us with old problems in a fresh language and with a fresh perspective. A central force of the work derives from her power to draw vignettes and her ability to portray emotions, seeing the world through the eyes of adolescent girls. The patterns that emerge in her handling of the novel demonstrate that she executed her work after careful planning. (p. 120)