P
erhaps the most critical choice that an author must make is to determine what point of view will the story be told. The choice the author makes will affect just about everything else the author does and may even influence how the author envisions the story being told. From a reader’s perspective, point of view determines how the reader will perceive the story and, ultimately, how they experience it. One of the general rules of thumb when writing a piece of fiction is to choose a point of view and stick to it. In Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway cautions:
Indeed, no writing rule is so frequently broken to such original and inventive effect as consistency of point of view, as several stories in this volume attest. Yet the general rule of consistency holds, and a writer who shows his amateurism in the failure to stick to a single point of view. Once established, point of view constitutes a contract between author and reader, at it will be difficult to break the contract gracefully. (292)
As with most general rules about writing, the general rule is: before one breaks a rule, one must first know and understand the rule. Furthermore, if an author is going to break this rule, it must be justified by some legitimate literary and storytelling purpose (and be successfully executed). Every time the point of view changes in a story, the reader must reorient him or herself, and the fictive dream is disrupted.
While no one is going to accuse Toni Morrison of not knowing the rules, it is worthwhile to examine the multiple points of view in her novel The Bluest Eye and ask what it is the effect of the shifting points of view, and how are they justified?
Along with multiple points of view, The Bluest Eye has a complex narrative structure. The story is told in non-linear fragments, and significant portions of the narrative are flashbacks. The primary focus of the novel is the lives of three characters: Claudia MacTeer, a young black girl growing up in a small town in Ohio along with her sister, Frieda, and Pecola Breedlove who is placed in their home while her father serves a jail sentence for burning down there home. The novel, however, is multi-generational, so we learn about the lives of Pecola’s parents as well of the lives of the people these girls interact with. This is where the multiple points of view are employed. The bulk of the story is told in first-person, present tense by Claudia, but from two different perspectives. First, there are Claudia’s observations as a nine-year-old participant in the story with the all the misapprehensions, and naivete that go with it. Early in the section labeled “Autumn” Claudia describes catching a cold and her mother’s care:
I lie down in my underwear, the metal in my black garters hurts my legs, but I do not take them off, for it is too cold to lie stockingless. It takes a long time for my body to heat its place in the bed. Once I have generated a silhouette of warmth, I dare not move, for there is a cold place one-half inch in any direction. No one speaks to me or asks how I feel. In an hour or two, my mother comes. Her hands are large and rough, and when she rubs the Vicks salve on my chest, I am rigid with pain. She takes two fingers’ full of it at a time and massages my chest until I am faint. Just when I think I will tip over into a scream, she scoops out a little of the salve on her forefinger and puts it in my mouth, telling me to swallow. A hot flannel is wrapped about my neck and chest. I am covered up with heavy quilts and order to sweat, which I do—promptly. (Morrison, 10)
This is an immediate and purely sensual experience of a child, reminiscent of our introduction to baby Stephan Dedalus in Joyce’s Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man. It is fixed in a moment and is in no way reflective. It reveals no larger interpretation or quest for meaning. There are no metaphors.
Just a page later, an older Claudia steps in and provides both more reflection and perspective.
But was it really like that? As painful as I remember? Only mildly. Or rather, it was a productive and fructifying pain. Love, thick and dark as Algae syrup, eased up into that cracked window. I could smell it—taste it—sweet, musty, with an edge of wintergreen in its base—everywhere in that house. It stuck, along with my tongue, to the frosted windowpanes. It coated my chest, along with the salve, and when the flannel came undone in my sleep, the clear, sharp, curves of air outlined its presence on my throat. And in the night, when my coughing was dry and tough, feet padded into the room, hands repinned the flannel, readjusted the quilt, and rested a moment on my forehead. So when I think of autumn, I think of somebody with hands who does not want me to die. (Morrison,12)
The passage duplicates the same experience on the previous pages but recasts it with an adult voice. It is still steeped in sensual imagery, but the imagery is now employed in the service of metaphor. It is the metaphor that lets us unlock Claudia’s older and wiser understanding of the scene. What she experienced as rough, impersonal treatment as a child, she now values as evidence of her mother’s love.
The transition between these two perspectives is made very clear, but very little disruption to the narrative and it first appears in the first pages of novel giving the reader an understanding of the narrative framework that they will be reading in for the rest of the novel. In Burroway’s language, it establishes a “contract” between the author and the reader in how this story is going to be told.
The parts of the novel that are not narrated by Claudia are the backstories of the main characters. All of these characters are essentially captives of their cultural heritage and family histories even if they are not fully aware of it or can articulate. It is these sections where Morrison employes first person omniscient. This allows Morrison to provide an insight into the circumstances of the character’s lives that they, by their nature, could not effectively provide.
The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly. Although their poverty was traditional and stultifying, it was not unique. But their ugliness was unique. No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly. Except for their father, Cholly, whose ugliness (the result of despair, dissipation, and violence directed toward petty things and weak people) was behavior, the rest of the family—Mrs. Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove—wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them. The eyes, the small eyes st closely together under narrow foreheads. The low, irregular hairlines, with seemed even more irregular in contrast to the straight, heavy eyebrows which nearly met. (Morrison, 38)
There is an objective, tone to this passage that could only come from a detached third party. It is a voice that is too harsh to be attributed to young Claudia, but not reflective enough to be attributed to older Claudia. Neither of these characters would be capable of providing the objectivity that Morrison requires of these parts of the novel.
The kind of story that Morrison chooses to tell The Bluest Eye is complex and some themes conflict with and contradict one other. A single, consistent point of view would have forced Morrison to simplify the view of the world in which these characters live and the harsh choices they are forced to make, negating what Morrison was trying to convey to begin. Furthermore, as we have seen, the critical choices that she made in writing the book this way can be easily justified by the effects she achieved. Her mastery of these points of view and her skill at weaving them all together is how the novel is so effective. If she might have been able to tell the story from a single point of view, but it would not be the story she was trying to create. She broke the rules successfully and the multiple points of view in it is as integral to the book’s DNA as the single, first-person point of view is, for example, in Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.
Works Cited
Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. Vintage Books, 2016.
Burroway, Janet, et al. Writing fiction: a guide to narrative craft. Pearson, 2015.
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