Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a novel portraying in poignant terms the tragic condition of blacks in a racist America. In her criticism of American life, she has structured her work in triadic patterns beginning with the reproduction of a passage three different times as the first three paragraphs of the work. Other triadic patterns emerge in her presentation of the tragedy of black life in relation to blacks, whites, and God or existential circumstances worked out through her thematic approach involving the problems of sex, racism, and love (or the dearth of love); in the aspect of ritual expressed through the scapegoat mechanism with the cat, the dog, and the girl, Pecola, as agents; and in the typology in the characterization affecting the three black family women—Geraldine, Mrs. MacTeer, and Mrs. Breedlove—and the three black prostitutes—The Maginot Line, China, and Poland. The pattern...