SOURCE: Malmgren, Carl D. “Texts, Primers, and Voices in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 41, no. 3 (spring 2000): 251-62.

In the following essay, Malmgren studies the multicultural and polyphonic structures of The Bluest Eye with respect to the novel's concern with victimization and its causes.

The Bluest Eye represents a remarkable undertaking, especially for a first novel. In terms of formal features, it might be described as a kind of narratological compendium. For one thing, the novel incorporates several different forms of textuality. It opens with three different versions of its epigraphic “master” text, several lines drawn from an elementary school primer. That is followed by an italicized “overture,” introducing the primary narrator, Claudia MacTeer, and the dominant motifs of the work—victimization and its causes:

It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to...