Toni Morrison has been a consistently insightful and
helpful critic of her work. With regard to her first novel, she has
indicated that her plan was to take love and the effects of its
scarcity in the world as her major themes, ¹ concentrating on the
interior lives of her characters, especially those of an enclosed
community. ² Her stated aim is to show "how to survive whole
in a world where we are all of us, in some measure, victims of
something." ³ Morrison's broad vision extends beyond the indi-
vidual to one that explores self-discovery in relation to a "shared
history." ⁴ In a film interview, Morrison has stated, "I suppose
The Bluest Eye is about one's dependency on the world for iden-
tification, self-value, feelings of worth." ⁵ In order to dramatize
the destructive effects of this kind of dependency, she intention-
ally exaggerates to find the limits.

Morrison's rich novels of growing awareness, personal
survival, and individual responsibility are often misunderstood
or given limited interpretations when readers fail to pay close at-
tention to her use of multiple narrative perspectives. ⁶ These
shifts from first to third, intimate to omniscient, guide readers
through often harrowing personal experiences and give personal
as well as lyrical overviews. In The Bluest Eye, Claudia MacTeer
provides a child's point of view--sometimes from an adult
perspective--while an omniscient voice relates information un-
known by Claudia. There are also passages shifting between
third person omniscient and first person stream of conscious-
ness. Morrison uses these combined voices to give varied per-
spectives without resorting to authorial intrusion or preaching.
She wants her readers to participate fully in her fiction, to go

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