The Strategic Use of Multiple Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Graciela López LópezJulio 2009

The Strategic Use of Multiple Narrative Voices in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

The intention of this paper is to examine the strategic use of different narrative

voices in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. The structure of the novel is polyphonic; it

involves a myriad of narrative voices that include Claudia MacTeer as a child, Claudia Mac

Teer as a reflective adult, some first person narration from Pecola’s mother, Pauline, and

some narration from an omniscient voice. Within these narrative voices we, as readers, are

also invited to hear, among others, three prostitute’s stories of lost love, a conversation

between Soaphead and God in an epistolary reflection and Pecola’s dialogue with an

imaginary friend after she has lost her mind

As we delve into the novel, we will try to establish in what ways the different

narrative voices serve different purposes in conveying meaning. We will also try to explore

the unfolding of the major thematic knots through the perspectives presented by the

different voices.

Our analysis of the multiple narrative voices will try to illustrate the different modes

of interrogation of memory, the relevance of folk culture and oral tradition, the role

language plays in developing minorities’ consciousness and how this consciousness resists

a monolithic categorization: a fact that is skillfully exemplified by the use of the very

diverse narrative voices in the novel.

Matus (1998:3) alleges that Toni Morrison’s fiction urges the reader to see that

identities are never built individually but are “constructed temporally, relationally and

socially”1 .Therefore a compelling characteristic of The Bluest Eye will be the fact that the

transmission of Pecola’s traumatic experience and Pecola’s experience itself resist a single

point of view and involve the individual, the family, the community, the cultural ideals, the

endorsement of such ideals and the traumas of history.

1 Matus, J Toni Morrison. Contemporary World Writers. Manchester University Press 1998

The Bluest Eye is a narrative that tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, an African-

American child who is marginalized by her community and the larger society. Pecola’s

story intersects and contrasts with that of Claudia’s, who will be the novel’s primary

narrator. However, it is important to clarify the fact that we will analyze the narrative

voices in the novel which involve the different narrators but go far beyond them. We will

understand narrative voices as those voices projected by the text. The narrative of The

Bluest Eye shifts unorthodoxly across and through different voices, probably in the attempt

to capture the inner life of the characters and to introduce the complexity of the social

forces that drive understanding and definition of cultural constructs such as beauty, identity,

family and sexuality.

Let us consider now the first beginning of the novel. Whose voice is introduced in it

and why? We could argue that the presentation of the Dick-and Jane primers bring in the

voice of a dominant culture to which black children are exposed through the concepts

included in their primary narratives. Gillespie sustains that the Dick-and Jane allusion

represents “an accepted, almost invisible controlling narrative, against which each of the

primary characters unconsciously evaluates her or his own existence. The story becomes a

litmus test against which the characters measure their self-worth”2 It could, however, be

argued that such an inclusion does not deserve the treatment of a narrative voice but we will

here maintain that it is indeed a very significant voice that will colour the whole of the story

and that will condition and even determine the lives of the characters presented in the book;

it is an unforgettable voice which we are reminded of every time we are told the story of the

Breedloves and that helps the writer reveal how pervasive and destructive “racialization”3

is. Here are the opening words of The Bluest Eye:

Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the

family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green and white house. They are very

happy

2 Gillespie, C A Critical Companion to Toni Morrison. A Literary Reference to her Life and Work Facts on File 20083 Racialization is Toni Morrison’s term for the racism that is a part of every person’s socialization. This is explained in: Conner, M (eds.) The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison. Speaking the Unspeakable University Press of Mississippi. 2000

The Dick and Jane readers were one of the primary instruments used to teach

generations of American children how to read. The ever-present voice of the standardized

paradigm of family becomes a powerful sign of what is normal and desirable. Toni

Morrison includes “White America’s voice” through a heading before each of the sections

about Pecola’s family and this becomes a bitter illustration of Pecola’s life in clear

opposition to the pink-skinned world of Dick and Jane. Each heading contradicts the story

that is about to be told. For instance, the section about Pecola’s house is introduced by the

Dick-and-Jane sentence about the house:

“HEREISTHEHOUSEITISGREENANDWHITEITHASAREDDOORITISVERYPRETTY

ITISVERYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYPRETTYP” whereas the chapter begins: “There is

an abandoned store on the southeast corner of Broadway and Thirty-fifth Street in Lorain,

Ohio”

A possible analysis of the insertion of such a narrative voice can be probably

explained by the interest of the author in the idea of racialised discourse and the way it has

helped Pecola come to think of herself as ugly, unworthy and displaced in a society where

the image of beauty and happiness is the one depicted by the readers at school. Mc Bride

claims that “As far as Pecola knows, racialized discourse has always been around and will

always be around. The real tragedy then is that Pecola, like all of us, has been seduced into

believing that “race” is and always has been real”4 The voice of the racialised discourse is

instrumental for it helps the author foreground the fact that such discourse has “created” the

meaning of “blackness” as opposed to the meaning of beauty, which in turn, helps the novel

develop one of the major themes in it: that of beauty and self-worth.

4 McBride,D Speaking the Unspeakable in Peterson,N Toni Morrison Critical and Theoretical Approaches Johns Hopkins University Press 1998

Let us now focus on the second beginning of the novel: that introduced by a young

Claudia who seems to invite us to share a piece of gossip. Much of the narration comes

from this nine-year old child and this brings into play the voice of some youthful

innocence, a voice that is able to see and analyze how the other characters, especially

Pecola, relate to each other, to the community and to themselves. In the opening lines this

narrative voice replicates the pattern of Black women gossiping in the backyard: “Quiet as

it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941.” Beaulieu (2003) suggests that the

narrative voice has a back fence connotation that creates a sense of intimacy between the

reader and the story, and they seem to be sharing a secret. This creation of a sense of

intimacy is necessary to prepare the reader for the terrible story that follows -a story of

rape, violence and self-loathing.5

Morrison also gives the reader the alternative of Claudia reflecting on the story as

an adult. This adult voice is now looking back on the events; when Claudia narrates, there

are two ‘I’s’. As readers we are aware from her narrative voice and her language that the

new Claudia is an adult working through memory. Grown-up Claudia’s voice is reflective:

“We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late”; she even doubts her ability as

a narrator and her ability to remember correctly: “we rearranged lies and called it truth”.

We could argue that the introduction of the two distinct voices of Claudia’s serve to

emulate the constant tension between the individual story and the communal one: inner

time and outer time fuse in Claudia narrating as she experiences and Claudia narrating as

she reflects on the experiences. Christian (1998), speaking of Toni Morrison’s use of these

two narrative voices, writes: “inner time is always transforming outer time through memory

(…) It is that reciprocity between the individual inner and the communal outer which your

[Morrison’s] work seeks”6 Adult Claudia’s use of the first person plural “we” -in contrast

with the innocent young Claudia’s “I”- shows this tension between personal history and

community history.

5 Beaulieu, E. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia Greenwood Publishing Group, 20036 Christian, B Op. cit.

The third beginning of the novel introduces a new narrator. When Claudia is not

narrating, a third-person narrator takes her place. The style of this omniscient voice is one

of great psychological intimacy. This omniscient narrator is not a detached observer, an

impassionate, distant voice but one that gives insights into the feelings of characters and

ocassionaly interprets hidden intentions, associations, fears, motivations. For instance,

when the omniscient voice narrates Pecola’s rape, we can perceive Cholly’s mental

elaborations: “Having no idea of how to raise children (…) he could not even comprehend

what such a relationship should be.”

On the other side, the pieces narrated by this voice are all focused on some aspect of

Pecola’s life. This omniscient voice becomes more authoritative and contrasts with the

Dick-and-Jane primers (also authoritative) but, with the inclusion of alternative individual

voices such as Soaphead, Pauline, Pecola and Cholly’s perspective of her daughter’s rape,

the ensemble of these voices with the omniscient narrator attempts to strike a balance.

However, not even the omniscient narrator becomes all-mighty and all-knowing in The

Bluest Eye.

Let us consider Pauline’s words as an example. Her narrative clearly expresses an

inner voice of the inner lives of black domestic experience. Although the omniscient

narrator emphasizes her social situation we can hear Pauline’s interior dreams: (“So when

Cholly come up and tickled my foot, it was like them berries, that lemonade, them streaks

of green june bugs made, all come together”); her individual way of perceiving the world

and the strong influence of her Southern upbringing: (“Northern colored folk was different

too. Dicty-like. No better than whites for meanness”). This interior monologue is written in

dialect; probably as part of the attempt to create an African-American history retold

through African-American discourse.

Another instance of a character´s voice’s intrusion in the narration, is Claudia’s

mother’s singing. Claudia’s recollection of her mother’s blues is suggestive of the tone

those words carry. Mother’s St. Louis Blues exhibits the central concerns of African-

American experience and also mirrors Claudia’s mother’s “conviction that sustains her in

times of trouble”7. What is relevant of the inclusion of Mother’s voice through the Blues is

7 Moses, C. The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye African American Review, Winter, 1999

the fact that, unlike the Breedloves, the MacTeers participate in the tradition and habits of

the Black community. Mrs MacTeer belongs in her community, shares the folk tradition

that include the creative possibility of going “somewhere else” (through music) when hard

times hit. This is shown in opposition to Pecola, whose “only somewhere else to go is

insane”8 because of “the poverty of her imagination which has not been nurtured by the

blues or any other source of cultural sustenance…”9

The importance of this oral transmission of culture is also depicted through the

voice of the gossiping women that pervades Claudia’s narration (“They were disgusted,

amused, shocked, outraged or even excited by the story”) , the prostitutes’ stories told to

Pecola and the way Claudia explains how she and her sister Frieda would try to figure out

what messages to believe and follow and the difference between what is said and what is

meant. On several occasions we find Claudia referring to the women’s sounds, the tones of

their voices that would complete the literal meaning of the words themselves; Claudia says

she and her sister would recognize “truth in timber”.

Pecola’s voice is also heard, though not in the form of a first-person narrator.

Morrison intentionally kept Pecola from a narration from her own perspective. In her own

words, Morrison states that she wanted to “try to show a little girl as a total and complete

victim of whatever was around her”10 and sustains that she needed the distance and

innocence of Claudia’s narration to do that. Pecola’s experience would have less meaning if

she told it herself, for a complete victim would be an unreliable narrator, unable to tell the

actual circumstances. Pecola is silent throughout almost the entire novel as she endures

blow after blow, as she is rejected once and again. Even as we are described how Pecola is

raped, there is no sign of how she felt. Her trauma is therefore an event without her voice

and “without a witness”11. She becomes the absolutely helpless victim. Her expressive

moment becomes a dialogue of a split self. It is only after Pecola has adopted ugliness as

her family’s definition, after she has been rejected by her mother over a white girl and

abused by her father, that she is given a voice:

8Moses, C. Op. Cit9 Moses, C. Op. Cit10Stepo, C. “Intimate Things in Place” an Interview with Toni Morrison (1977) as quoted by David, R. Toni Morrison Explained. Ramdom House 200011 Matus, J. Op. Cit.

Why? Are you mad at me?Yes.Because my eyes aren’t blue enough? Because I don’t have the bluest eyes?No. Because you are acting sillyDon’t go. Don’t leave me. Will you come back if I get them?Get what?The bluest eyes. Will you come back then?

Pecola’s voice becomes a divided, fragmented one that resembles the divided

fragmented self we see at the end of the novel. When Pecola finally speaks, it is a deeply

subjective voice that evidences the consequence of a fragile black girl being belittled,

marginalized and rejected: self-hatred. Not only is Pecola’s self deficient but practically

inexistent. Her family’s submission (and her own) to a hierarchy imposed by the white

dominant culture got her to believe that the blacker you are, the uglier: therefore, her desire

for “the bluest eyes”. We could also assume this dialogue of her split self may be the

author’s way to show that going psychologically fractured is Pecola’s way of emotionally

reacting to her inability to cope with her devastating experience.

In Toni Morrison’s words her intention in resorting to multiple voices seems to be

“to make the story appear oral, mandering, effortless, spoken-to have the reader feel the

narrator withour identifying that narrator or hearing him or her knock about, and to have the

reader work with the author in the construction of the book... What is left out is as

important as what it is there”12

Christian (1998) explains how as a result of oral storytelling, African-American

tradition has survived and has been one basis of the persistence of its culture. Through this

kind of narrative, that includes the actual voices of African-Americans, Toni Morrison

acknowledges this culture as having legitimate conventions capable of being transferred

into a novel. In her Nobel Lecture in Literature, Morrison (1993) explains how she

considers narrative to be one of the “principal ways in which we absorb knowledge.”13 The

shift of narrative voices may evoke the oral narratives that African-Americans passed on

from generation to generation and may also remind us that stories are told from one person

to another staying alive only when they are remembered and retold. It also shows the

inevitable distortions the story undergoes as it passes on from one teller to another.

It can also be suggested that the narrative structure of The Bluest Eye may carry the

intention of foregrounding the African-American real discourse as an emblem of the

struggle to represent an experience “...that the language is not intended to accommodate.

Such texts constitute the attempt to write the seemingly unwritable, the unspeakable”14

McBride continues to suggest that the novel initiates a struggle that enables African-

Americans to speak to and about a community whose lives may be different but who suffer

from a common form of racial hegemony. This attempt can be exemplified by the inclusion

of the Dick-and-Jane lines in clear contrast with the lives of the Breedloves. Morrison’s

concern with voice in the novel may be connected with these questions about the nature of

language and narratives. Beaulieu (2003) even sustains that her experimental use of

narrative voices “provides alternatives to this patriarchal, Western way of telling stories”15

12 Morrison, T “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” in Evan, M (ed.) Black Women Writers (1959-1980) A Critical Evaluation. Anchor-Doubleday 198413 Morrison, T. Nobel Prize in Literature Lecture 199314 Mc Bride,D. Op. Cit.15 Beaulieu,E. Op. Cit.

Her multiple narrative voices “represent the voice of the griot”16 and her lyrical storytellers

replicate the African oral storytelling tradition of the griot.

This complexity of voices demands also a more active participation on the part of

the reader who must “reassemble the parts in order to see the whole”17 . Through the

strategic use of multiple narrative voices the reader is involved in unfolding the meaning in

the text and therefore experiences this sense of community. In The Bluest Eye there is no

intention of clear resolutions because, to some extent, the story is the result of individual

storytelling. When readers are faced with such multiplicity of voices they understand

interpretations are highly subjective.

On the other side, in employing multiple narrative voices, we can suggest Toni

Morrison makes sure no voice becomes the “truth”. The gossiping women are entitled to

narrate in their own right, the prostitutes are shown in their humanity and become part of

the narrative, Claudia’s perspective is balanced by an omniscient voice and Cholly’s

insights are exposed. The fact that Pecola is hardly heard puts the reader in the position to

learn about her through all the other voices. This may also be an indicator of the consistent

and unavoidable impact that family, community and society have on an individual. The

Bluest Eye ends with a heart-breaking reflection on how the community reacted to Pecola’s

trauma: “we listened for the one who would say, ’Poor little girl’ or ‘Poor baby’ but there

was only head-wagging where those words should have been. We looked for eyes creased

with concern, but saw only veils”. So, we could conclude that the fact that Toni Morrison

includes diverse voices can also hint at the individual and collective responsibility that not

only “White America” has in imposing excluding standards but the African-American

community for accepting and even embracing them.

16 Beaulieu,E. Op. Cit.17 Gillespie, C.A Op. Cit.

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