Winter, The Bluest Eye

"It wass not long before the child discovered the difference in his mother's behavior to himself and towards the cat. As he grew older, he learned how to direct his hatred of his mother to the cat, and spent some happy moments watching it suffer." (My page numbers are different than everyone else's, so I won't put the page number.)









Morrison has this long, descriptive narrative about a very unhappy woman with no real cause for her unhappiness. Everything in the world has gone right for her, but she just looks at it with a blank expression and moves on to the next thing. She has managed to do this with even the most precious things in life, including her son, but excluding one very fortunate cat. Somewhere in this woman's thoughts, the instructions for raising children and raising animals were mistakenly switched. This child somehow learns to adjust anyways, even without most of the emotional guidance most children need.









Junior, this child, brings to mind the hassle that childhood is in this novel. He can't do anything, and no one is really interested in helping him out. His own mother, who is responsible for this, is useless, but he can't do anything to antagonize his mother, because she'll just punish him. He learns that the only way he's going to get through his early onset angst is to transfer it to something that won't hurt him as badly as his mother. Morrison just seems to have a real thing against childhood, at least in this novel. Being young means being helpless and foolish. It really makes me wonder if it is truly better to be young and innocent and not have a care in the world, or know it all and fear it all and hate it all. It's not really the easiest thing to answer.

And not only that, it makes a point about people. They don't want to acknowledge that they are at fault; they always want someone else to blame. Geraldine blames her people, Junior, the cat.