After this section, Morrison offers us a fragment of memory, set in italics. Claudia MacTeer, a childhood friend of Pecola's, is talking. She says that she remembers the autumn when no marigolds bloomed. That was the fall, she says, when Pecola Breedlove gave birth to her father's baby. Why the incest happened, Claudia says, is too difficult to fathom. Perhaps we should be concerned only with how it happened: how the chaos of Pecola Breedlove's life culminated and climaxed into her giving birth to her own father's child, and then deteriorated into madness.
Morrison divides the rest of the novel into four separate time sequences, each of them a season of the year and each narrated by Claudia MacTeer, now a grown woman. Within these season sequences are narratives by an omniscient, all-knowing voice; these sections are introduced by run-on, unpunctuated lines from the first-grade reading book. Finally, near the end of the novel, a single section records a conversation between Pecola and a fantasy friend that she creates. At last we witness the madness that has enveloped the main character of the novel.
As the novel unfolds, listen to the voices of these two narrators. Remember that Claudia's narration is told in retrospect; she is an adult, looking back. The other narrator, the omniscient narrator, gives us background stories about Pecola's mother and father, as well as seemingly random but interlocking and connecting elements about Pecola's futile longing for blue eyes and her need to feel beautiful and loved in a society that defines her as ugly. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison zeroes in on the psychological damage done to a black girl who self-destructively accepts someone else's definition of beauty — here, the white culture's definition of the ideal way a young girl should look. Pecola's quest is for whiteness, synonymous with beauty; blackness, the symbol for ugliness, is something to be feared and avoided.
