Tiani McCarthyProfessor MorrisApril 2014The Bluest EyeIdentity Crisis: The Bluest EyeThe Bluest Eye describes the lives of three young black girls living in the Ohio after the Great Depression of the 1940s. One of them acquires an inferiority complex after years of not only mental and physical but also sexual abuse. This constant abuse and criticism causes the main character Pecola Breedlove to yearn for a happier life where she is loved by everyone for having beautiful blue eyes like some of the iconic white celebrity children of that era. (Morrison 19) She believes that having a “whiter” physical appearance will improve her life. Pecola consequently loses her mind and self-destructs due to her incessant desire to become other than what she is. Toni Morrison tells this tragic story of a girl's desperate need to be accepted by her family, peers, and society using various themes, including self-destruction. Value is based on society's perception of beauty, self-hatred or internalized racism, and the effect parents have on their children. The story begins with a first-person narration from nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer. She and her ten-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents who welcome two people into their home one fall. Pecola Breedlove finds herself temporarily homeless after her mentally ill father burns down their house during a violent episode. Pecola is a shy and timid girl with a very difficult home life where her parents are constantly in conflict and discord. "And Pecola. She hid behind hers. (The ugliness) Hidden, veiled, eclipsed - peeking very rarely behind the shroud, and then only to long for the return of her mask" (Morrison 39) . Throughout her life, Pecola was told she was ugly and ignorant by those impregnated by her father. After being raped, the young girl must internalize her father's self-loathing as well as the pain she now carries, not only in theory but in reality as she carries Cholly's child. Pecola is a symbol of the black community and its beliefs. that white beauty is superior to theirs. At the end of the novel, Claudia admits that the town has acted out its self-hatred by using Pecola as a scapegoat for the entire community. Her ugliness made them relatively beautiful in appearance, and her silent suffering provided them with an opportunity to assert their superiority by pointing out what they saw as the faults and weaknesses of a young black girl. At the very end of the novel, when Pecola wanders on the outskirts of the city, she becomes the symbol of human cruelty and a sad reminder of a community that turns its back on its own people..