The Bluest Eye - Book Report/Review Example

This novel forced the reader to look into reality and those who banned it perhaps found a bit too much in common between themselves and the characters in the book. Each character was on their own journey or odyssey and faced issues that far too many face today. Morrison's novel confronts the very issues that all cultures attempt to find: Identity, the ability to define, find and ultimately express love; the parent-child relationship, a tangible definition of friendship; an attempt to meet the ultimate white standard of beauty and a belief in "romantic love," Incest, child abuse and of course are other major themes.

In reading this novel perhaps whites are forced to recognize their direct roles in the self perception of the black race. It was impossible, I imagine for a white to recognize the fact that they took away and chance of identity that blacks had any chance of having. This of course began a chain reaction and while the whites were marginalizing the blacks effortlessly, the community in "The Bluest Eye" marginalized Pecola. It is no secret that in watching the unbridled suffering of another or in this novel "The Other", the reader looses their own innocence much as Claudia the narrator did.

Perhaps this is a reason why the book was banned. Perhaps a white person suffering is more palatable to read. It is an ironic concept though, when the whites were the genesis of the sufferings of blacks. Perhaps those who banned this book found it to be a bit too confrontational. I think that the reason why the book was banned is because the basic tenet of the novel was perception. Perception is something that is all of us as humans see and feel. Once a person has obtained their perception about a thing, person or race, there is little to be done to change it.

This is especially so when it is fortified by the masses. Perhaps those who sought to ban this novel did so because their perception of the writer and the community she represented in her writings were badly shaken. Perhaps others might agree with her. Perhaps the threat lied with the fact that the age of the seventies had arrived (publication had finished by 1974) and there would be new minds reading the novel and perhaps looking to right so many wrongs. In any case, pulling down this book was