Mundane Irony

            I have an unhealthy fascination with light eyes. Unhealthy is putting it harshly giving that said obsession is in no way harmful to my health. But there’s something with the direct contrast of such color to someone’s skin that is just so beautiful. But my interest with light eyes is a trivial matter, not rooting itself in any other reason than pure beauty. It is not in any way based on interior political or social concepts or insecurities. Which is what I infer to be the case when it comes to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. The fact that it has to do with the social aspect of African Americans during a period where equality was far from what it’s defined as in the dictionary, shows itself in the title. The longing to have blue eyes, usually encased with the Caucasian and white persona, demonstrates the inner conflict of an African American girl who longs to attain them, and in attaining them, attaining the life, the respect, and the freedom they symbolize. But that’s just me wrapping myself in conjecture.

            The opening lines of the novel are sharp and abrupt sentences like, “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy. See Jane. She has a red dress. She wants to play.” The structure makes it so that the juvenile thoughts and childlike perspective is palpable. Fine, I said. She wants to show the reader that she is actually speaking from her childhood. But then the paragraph that is made up of these words is repeated sans any periods whatsoever, creating an effect of eternity and someone loosing their breath, a run-on of a sentence. A run-on of a life. And so now I feel that this is not just a blatant demonstration of the character’s age, but also a clear portrayal of how said character views her life. After that, the same sentence is repeated but with every single word glued to each other, attached as if binding to form one whole unending word. And that just makes it seem as if Claudia, the protagonist, has repeated the former paragraph so many times that it just becomes ingrained in her mind until it is but mere words, not meaning anything, just a routine, common in its normalcy and blandness.

            And while anyone else might just skip over the same three paragraphs with mere differences in punctuation and spacing, figuring them mere repetitions, I slow my pace and focus all the more. Because in those three ‘similar’ paragraphs, I think the entire generality of the novel lies naked in front of us. The words themselves are mundane, “Dick and Jane”, “Mom and Dad”, Father is “big and strong”, dog goes “bowwow.” The words themselves are so cliché and ordinary that they should be overlooked, but in reality they highlight themselves. They provide the reader with a semblance of normalcy but they really mean just the opposite. The protagonist’s life is anything but that picture perfect paragraph. It’s ironic. And the structure of the paragraphs lies in a way so that they resemble not only her thoughts, but her desires. The way it slowly comes together in one thread shows how much she has repeated that story to herself, how it is one of those recurring dreams that plague you and crawl on you in their reality in in their ability to consume you. Those three paragraphs show how distanced she is from her life, and how much she wishes for something else.