Maybe everything would be beautiful.Ĭlaudia's narrative returns with Winter. Each night Pecola fervently prays for blue eyes, sky-blue eyes, thinking that if she looked different - pretty - perhaps everything would be better. We see Pecola and her brother, Sammy, bracing themselves for the ordeal of listening to their mother quarreling violently with their drunken father, Cholly, as he tries to sleep off the effects of the previous night's whiskey.Īgainst a backdrop of grinding poverty, with her parents locked in an ugly cycle of hostility and violence, Pecola seeks hope in her prayers for beauty, which she feels will lead to her being loved. She describes the house where the Breedloves lived (before Cholly burned it down), and she points out the antagonistic relationship between Pecola's parents. The second narrator offers us her memories about Pecola's family. Pecola and the MacTeer girls share childhood adventures, and what Claudia remembers in particular is the startling onset of Pecola's puberty when the eleven-year-old girl unexpectedly has her first menstrual period.

The family soon has another roomer - Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl whom county officials place in the MacTeer home after Pecola's father burns the family house down. Henry as a roomer because his rent money will help pay bills. Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, have just started school. We then segue into a lengthy flashback, to Autumn 1940, a year before the fall when no marigolds bloomed. She tells us that Pecola's father, Cholly Breedlove, is now dead, the baby is dead, and the innocence of the young girls also died that fall. She was only a child then, but she remembers that no marigolds bloomed that fall, and she and her friends thought it was probably because their friend and playmate, Pecola, was having her father's baby. The other narrator, the omniscient narrator, then braids her stories into Claudia's season sections, introducing influential characters and events that shape Pecola's life.Ĭlaudia MacTeer is now a grown woman, telling us about certain events that happened during the fall of 1941.

retrospective narration as an adult contains her childhood memories about what happened to Pecola.

In the sections labeled with the name of a season, Claudia MacTeer's. The events in The Bluest Eye are not presented chronologically instead, they are linked by the voices and memories of two narrators.

The bluest eye sparknotes