Pecola's Friend

Throughout our discussion for the past few weeks on Toni Morrison’s Novel, “The Bluest Eye,” we spent class time discussing how Morrison talks to her audience about the horrible impacts of racism and beauty standards. Even if I personally could not make every connection that was talked about in class, The connections that we made in class were both thought provoking and insightful. However, should this have been or Morrison’s intentions or not, there was yet another message I managed to take from the closing moments of Morrison’s Novel, from the final chapter, when Pecola talks with her imaginary friend. As a personal take away from this chapter, I found a message in the importance of friendship, and in having someone being there for you, which is a theme that I found to have been relevant throughout other sections of the novel as well, including the telling of Soaphead’s tale, and the chapter on Cholly. I believe that Morrison managed to tell the importance of company in how it shapes someone specifically in the chapter involving Pecola and her imaginary friend, as this is where we first begin to see the shattered state of mind that Pecola is left with. By having no one but herself to bounce her negative thoughts around, they simply settled and were watered by her surroundings, and they eventually polluted the earth that was her mind. Until the only positivity she could focus on were her eyes, so blue, so pure, and so beautiful, that she was the only one that could see them. Her lack of companionship and support trapped her negative emotions, planted by her society, and caused them to grow into dandelions, killing off the joy that had still yet to grow into beautiful flowers nearby. Pecola’s aloneness caused her to eventually “step over into madness” a very real madness that loneliness always drags around with it.