The Blues in The Bluest Eye

The woeful voices of Blues singers are rhythmically parallel with the narrative voice of The Bluest Eye. In synchrony, are the story of Pecola, intertwined with those who led to her demise, and the songs of blues voicing harsh realities. Each is its own story of woe and suffering, more a rhythmic talk than a melody, but still expressing mourning, pain, and suffering.  Early blues took a form of a loose narrative, in a rhythmic talk more than a melody, the singer voicing personal woes in a world of harsh reality. Deriving from the work songs, spirituals, shouts, and chants of the African American communities in sufferable times, blues took on a meaning of more than just a song, but a live emotion, a live expression. Blues are mournful and melancholy; they express gloom and heartbreak, reality, and the harshness of life.  

Morrison’s voice, spoken through the various narrators throughout The Bluest eye, is like a Blues song. It is not a melody, but rhythmic talk, a loose narrative, which weaves the story of woe and melancholy, the story of the harsh reality of what happened to Pecola. Just as a Blues song does not give away the “why,” but only the how because why is too hard to handle, because the why of a breakup is too hard to handle, because the why of slavery is too hard to handle, because the why of death is too hard to handle, Morrison beautifully writes the story of Pecola’s woe, her destruction, even though it is hard to understand why it happened. The point Morrison tries to make is not why what happens, happens, but the moral behind what and how it happened.

Blues are loose narratives, they tell woeful stories of loss and pain, they try to make sense of their lives, about loves that left or death or suffering. Just as in Morrison’s novel, the characters each try to make sense of their own lives. Each of their stories is a collection of their misery, and the unnaturalness in which it happens that Morrison highlights. These stories told in both Blues songs and in Morrison’s novel express the misery gone through by the beholder.  Each main character in Morrison’s novel has their own story. Just as every blues song has a back story. Each character has a song to sing, a story full of woe to tell, each character has their Blues.

The color blue is associated with misery, loss, and woe. The name “Blues” fits perfectly, almost ironically, with the music itself. The woeful, almost whiny voices of Blues singer’s give off the tone and the feeling of sadness and strikes in the audience the same emotions. The same goes with The Bluest Eye. Morrison’s story is blue, the bluest hue of blues.  It is sadness, it is sorrow, and it is misery.  Hence, the name the “bluest” eye can also mean the saddest: Pecola’s. Once she determined that she wanted blue eyes, and acquired them, her life went even more downhill. Her eyes were the bluest, the saddest. She had the bluest story, the biggest woe in her eyes and in her life.