Depressingly Cobalt

The thing about the Bluest Eye is that the narrator is not the protagonist. While Pecola Breedlove is the protagonist of the story, a lot of the narration was done in the perspective of Claudia, which makes me wonder why.

While we're on the topic of characters, let's... well, talk about characters. While Claudia's actions have mostly been active, such as when she destroyed the white baby doll, Pecola is quite the opposite. She is, I suppose, passive, and she isn't as brave as Claudia is in terms of her actions. In fact, while Claudia represents the black community's courage and hope, Pecola represents its ignorance and cowardice. Or something like that. Pecola truly believes that white is beautiful and black is ugly, such as when said "Yes, you are right," when told that "you are ugly people".

Pecola is the physical manifestation of the opposite of black pride, and she wishes, "Please make me disappear." She wonders if things were different and if she were beautiful, people would treat her differently.

"Pretty eyes. Pretty blue eyes. Big blue pretty eyes."

Each night, Pecola wishes for blue eyes. She hears a song about a happy brown boy that makes the "dirt leap for joy" and doubts whether it's real. She isn't treated the best way by both the white community and the black community. She's a joke. She is "ugly". These situations and looks into Pecola's mind imply the way black people are treated, Pecola's mindset, the pressure, the sorrow, the whatnots. That's just sad.

I really like seeing humor in my books, and this doesn't seem lighthearted. When it is, it implies something even more depressing.

The book is excellently written, but I have to say that I prefer books that make me happy when I go to bed, books that don't make anything that is blue seem like something I should be ashamed about.

Being Wrong, I Corrected Them

A dangling modifier is a modifier in a sentence that modifies the wrong thing. For example, in the sentence "Walking to school, the trees were beautiful," the "walking to school incorrectly modifies the trees, making it sound like a couple attractive teenage trees were walking to school, when the writer meant to say that as HE was walking to school, he saw a couple trees, which were beautiful.

"The trees, which I saw as I was walking to school, were beautiful."
"As I walked to the school, I saw trees, which were beautiful."
"Walking to school, I saw beautiful trees."

Or something.

Funnily enough, a lot of these dangling modifiers and other grammatical errors presented in this article are tested in the writing section of the SAT. After having some SAT prep and SAT practice, not only have I found out that SAT prep courses are money-munching, but also that I have been making a lot of these mistakes.

Something interesting is that a lot of these mistakes are commonly spoken and acceptable in a verbal context, but not so much in a written form. I literally (yes, literally, not the fake literally you see littered throughout the internet) hear the phrases "the reason why" or "the reason is... because" everyday, and generally they aren't frowned upon (though I tend to cringe a little every time the phrases are uttered... oh, SAT prep, what hast thou doneth to me?). As the aforementioned article makes it clear, it's a grammatical error, but hey, it's not like you can change the way everyone speaks.

Physicists... You should know better.

Conclusion?
There are so many grammatical mistakes out there.
Written English isn't the same as spoken English.
SAT prep makes you a grammar Nazi.

Beautifully Dark

Something about the way the book is narrated is unsettling, and I have no idea how this mood was embedded into the text. I might be making this up, but the book manages to keep stuff dark and stuff. If I am making this up, it's probably because I read this at night, when human beings are most emotional and susceptible to stuff.

There's this part when Claudia is given a "beautiful" doll, a white doll with blue eyes and blonde hair. Claudia starts breaking it apart, attempting to "examine it to see what it was that all the world said was lovable." Then the narration goes on to say that she would have rather wanted to be asked what she would have wanted for Christmas, at which she would have answered that she would have wanted to hear her father play the violin among other things. Pretty heavy. It's the true beauty that Claudia wanted to find, not the false one found in the doll, which when taken apart, revealed the "mere metal roundness" within.

Fun Fact: This is the roundest object on earth. It is an exactly 1kg silicon sphere.

Along with this, we see a lot of violence, ignorance, and the likes (both explicitly and implicitly) as we're constantly given descriptions of beatings and blatant English mistakes (that I assume, in the character's standpoint, was not meant to be one) such as referring to that one thing women do once a month (shopping spree, obviously) as "ministratin'".

How better to end this segment of the book by asking "how do you get somebody to love you?" and not getting an answer back.

A Description

Innocently Azure

As we start the story of The Bluest Eye, we are introduced to the protagonist (or whom I believe to be the protagonist), Claudia. It seems apparent that she is an adult, looking back and narrating the story in the perspective of her younger self and stuff like that. Her perspective is unique, as I mentioned and predicted in the previous post, as our narrator seems to be a simultaneously mature and young lady with a possibly (probably) disturbed past.

As a child, Claudia is prone to crying, afraid of being beaten and stuff. It's clear she doesn't understand everything, and the innocence of a little girl is portrayed well. For example, when Claudia's mother is angry, Claudia thinks that her mom is angry at her, when in actuality she is angry at her sickness. As the narrator shifts from past to present, Claudia wonders whether everything was as she remembered. She concludes that there was a lot of love involved.

The discrimination is quite apparent in the following situations, where harsh (or raw? What is this) language makes a stark contrast between the innocent eyes perceiving it. A lot of the text seems to show innocence and purity, all the while having an underlying darker tone.

Then the innocence crumbles away...

Distressingly Blue

I've started reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, and it is with the most disappointment that I state that the cover of the book is purple. That aside, let's start with the title.

The Bluest Eye.

Why blue? Is it to show sadness?

I'm going to say that the blue eye is there either to show uniqueness or to demonstrate a usually white trait, which would make sense in a book with a black protagonist. The eye is THE human organ that everyone will use to appear "deep" and all that stuff. But really, I think it's perspective that the eye is supposed to symbolize. In short, I think this will be a story from someone with a unique or black (or both) perspective. This directly relates to...

The first part of the book is a short thingy in the viewpoint of a little girl, Jane. It's a childish diary-esque narration about how no one plays with Jane, until a friend comes. then the same passage is repeated without any punctuation or capitalization giving off an entirely different feel and finally thewholethingisrepeatedagainwithoutanyspacesinbetweenthewordsmakingitabigbunchofwhatthehellisgoingon

When I first read this, it was rather disturbing and uncomfortable. As the apparently naive narration about a little girl was distorted to the point that it was chaotic and almost unreadable, a strong feeling came through the book. In a way, I think this might be setting the tone for the beginning of the book, if not the whole of it.

Pretty nice.

Except the purple bit.

Really Not Real

Out of all the statements we could have started with, it's going to be "this statement is a lie." It's one of the better known paradoxes, and it's one of those that makes Pinocchio's nose go crazy. Also, if I were a computer, I would be forced to shut down, spending the rest of my days remembering that one time I was dumb enough to even start processing an infinite loop.

It is a human's ability to not do any of that crap, to not think in one set way, to have "doubt". And because of this simultaneous perfectness and imperfectness, anything we see or tell isn't reality. Reality simply IS reality, but the moment we try to mimic it, tell it, interpret it, or even show it, it's not quite reality. Or, as the author or some other guy put it, "the real story isn't the official story; the real story is my version (wrong, too, but aware that it's wrong) of the official story." In fact, I guess you could say that any sentence with "story" and "reality" in the same line is antithetical. Don't quote me on that.

So, the author asks a very good question: "The world exists. Why re-create it?"
This kept me thinking in front of my computer for about two minutes, which is more than a lot of people can say. Well, people are emotional thingies, so we strive for emotion (or perhaps lack thereof), entertainment, and some other word that starts with e. I don't know the exact logic behind it, but I believe it was inevitable that complex lifeforms seek to do this kind of stuff. As it's stated again and again, reality simply is.

Anything I've written isn't reality. Reality Hunger isn't reality.
If there's anything I learned, it's that nothing is reality.
Except reality. That's the real deal.