The events in The Bluest Eye are not presented chronologically; instead, they are linked by the voices and memories of two narrators. In the sections labeled with the name of a season, Claudia MacTeer's. retrospective narration as an adult contains her childhood memories about what happened to Pecola. 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.
Claudia MacTeer is now a grown woman, telling us about certain events that happened during the fall of 1941. 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. 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.
We then segue into a lengthy flashback, to Autumn 1940, a year before the fall when no marigolds bloomed. Claudia and her older sister, Frieda, have just started school. That autumn, the MacTeers accept Mr. Henry as a roomer because his rent money will help pay bills. 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.
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.
