The Bluest Eye   

-Mayor Characters 

   * Pecola Breedlove -  The protagonist of the novel, an eleven-year-old black girl who believes that she is ugly and that having blue eyes would make her beautiful. Sensitive and delicate, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is lonely and imaginative.

Pecola's need to achieve a white kind of beauty is not only linked to America's beauty obsession, however. Pecola also thinks that if she were prettier, her parents wouldn't fight so much. This is the classic "it's my fault" logic that many kids have when their parents fight, taken to an extreme. Pecola is constantly victimized and humiliated throughout the novel. When we first meet her she is homeless By the end of the novel, Pecola has completely lost touch with reality. Unable to process and accept the fact that she has been raped by her father, she becomes convinced that everyone in town is looking at her strangely because she received her wish of blue eyes. She acquires an imaginary friend whom she talks to almost exclusively about her eyes.

*Claudia MacTeer -  The narrator of parts of the novel. An independent and strong-minded nine-year-old, Claudia is a fighter and rebels against adults’ tyranny over children and against the black community’s idealization of white beauty standards. She has not yet learned the self-hatred that plagues her peers.Claudia is the primary narrator of the book. An inquisitive, sensitive young girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio, Claudia is the product of a loving family. Her narration is interesting in that it moves back and forth between her reflective, adult stance and a more innocent, childlike one. At the end of the novel, Claudia and Frieda spend the entire summer selling marigold seeds in order to buy themselves a bicycle. Once they learn of Pecola's pregnancy, they sacrifice their seed money as a payment to God, in the hope that he will allow Pecola's baby to survive.

*Cholly Breedlove - By all rights, we should hate Cholly Breedlove, given that he rapes his daughter. But Morrison explains in her afterword that she did not want to dehumanize her characters, even those who dehumanize one another, and she succeeds in making Cholly a sympathetic figure. He has experienced genuine suffering, having been abandoned in a junk heap as a baby and having suffered humiliation at the hands of white men. He is also capable of pleasure and even joy, in the experience of eating a watermelon or touching a girl for the first time. He is capable of violence, but he is also vulnerable, as when two white men violate him by forcing him to perform sexually for their amusement and when he defecates in his pants after encountering his father. Cholly represents a negative form of freedom. He is not free to love and be loved or to enjoy full dignity, but he is free to have sex and fight and even kill; he is free to be indifferent to death. He falls apart when this freedom becomes a complete lack of interest in life, and he reaches for his daughter to remind himself that he is alive. Cholly has no role model to teach him how to be a parent or love children. 

   When he becomes a father, he is at a complete loss at what to do. He starts to use alcohol as a way to cope with fatherhood, married life, and the pressure of being the breadwinner, which leads to bouts of violence and the neglect of his family. After Cholly rapes Pecola, his daughter, near the end of the novel, he slips out of view and dies alone at a workhouse.

*Pauline Breedlove - Pauline is Pecola's mom, and her character allows us to see how cultural conceptions of beauty can play themselves out in a more benign, though still unfortunate, form than in Pecola's case. Pauline's lame foot is a constant source of humiliation for her. Once she moves to Ohio, she must contend with regional and social class barriers to normative beauty that she had never imagined. Up north, Pauline's southern accent makes her stick out like a sore thumb, and her inability to keep up with the latest fashion takes its toll on her spirit as well. When Pauline loses herself in Hollywood films and styles her hair like Jean Harlow feel prettier, we see that not only were little girls influenced by white celebrity culture, but older black women as well. Once she loses her tooth, Pauline's preoccupation with making herself beautiful is replaced with an obsession with being the perfect servant for the Fishers. In this affluent white household, Pauline gets to pretend that the Fisher kitchen is her kitchen, that the money she receives to buy their groceries is her money, and maybe even that their little white daughter is her daughter. Just like her daughter Pecola, Pauline creates an elaborate fantasy world that consumes her.