As I’m looking at the painting, I am immediately drawn to the girl looking at an old record player. Around her are owls in some type of room with 3 openings and in the background you can see a train. In the sky, there is a crescent moon. From what I see, is a girl longing for something while she is looking at the record player because her shadow is not similar to her current posture. In her shadow, her arms are stretched out like wings about to fly. And with the train in the background, it is no coincidence. The girl in the painting longs for freedom and wisdom. Owls symbolize wisdom and they are constantly flying in the painting, symbolizing the freedom she desires. With the train in the background, she is looking at the train wanting to be on the train to get away from this odd room. The color red on the record player symbolizes the sin of her desire. One of the 7 deadly sins is envy. The girl is envious of the freedom she sees in the owls and the train going by. Even though the odd room has 3 openings, she is trapped in her mind hence the title a Recursive Dream; dreaming of freedom and that is why the sky has the crescent moon.

After finishing the novel, Toni Morrison remarked that the reason she wrote the novel was because a friend of hers wished she had blue eyes. Morrison mentioned that beauty was not simply the eye of the beholder; it was something one could do. What she meant was that someone’s standard of beauty can have power over someone. In the novel, Pecola wished for blue eyes and after she is raped by her father, she goes to Soaphead Church to have that wish granted. She starts to decent into madness and thinks that she has blue eyes and believes that she is beautiful. Because of the rape, she believed that it was her father’s way to show that she loved her and that she is beautiful. Society’s beauty standards are what “something one could do” as Morrison phrased it. It controls people into believing that the standards of what beauty is supposed to be is what every woman should aspire to be to be considered worthy. Throughout the entire novel, the readers sees what it can do to little black girls like Pecola: it can damage them and make them feel that they are worthless and not worthy of being loved. The main reason why Morrison wrote this novel is to show the audience what society’s beauty standards can do to little girls like Pecola. Having this control over people tends to break them and make themselves believe that they can be worth something and respected if they are considered beautiful by society. Another example from the novel of Morrison’s quote was Soaphead Church and how he made Pecola believe that she has received blue eyes after poisoning the old dog. Beauty is something one could do is simply having power over people and how it can influence people. When black girls do not have someone to idolize that looks like them, it can destroy them and make them believe that they are not beautiful like Pecola. Not having enough diversity in the media is still an issue to this day where many women of color as girls did not have many famous black women to look up to. In The Bluest Eye, Claudia, Freida, and Pecola had only Shirley Temple and Jean Harlow who were white women. Pecola was fascinated by the Shirley Temple cup that she drank all the milk using that cup. It is that kind of mindset that would lead to Pecola’s downfall and eventually madness. She believed that if she had blue eyes, she would be considered beautiful and may even be loved by not only her family but by others as well.

In this section of the book, it tells the backstory of Charles “Cholly” Breedlove. Cholly was abandoned by his mother who left him in a trashcan 4 days after he was born. His father left before he was born. His great-aunt Jimmy raised him and loved him like he was her own son. After Jimmy passes away, Cholly is left alone is given male figures to look up to who are not considered good role models. His first sexual encounter with a girl named Darlene was ruined and humiliated by a group of white men who harassed and watched them have sex. Cholly is filled with hatred and anger towards Darlene since he did not know how to direct his anger towards the people that wronged him in the first place. When he runs away to find his father, Samson Fuller rejects him and Cholly is full of sadness and mourning for Aunt Jimmy since she was the only one who could comfort him. When Cholly is abandoned by his parents and loses the only mother he had ever known, Cholly is psychologically damaged and is not given the proper care to help with his feelings of abandonment and anger. His twisted way of showing love is caused by his difficult past. For example, his father abandoning him was a not a good example of how he should raise his own children. At the end of this section, he rapes his own daughter Pecola because in his mind he showing her love and giving her happiness. He constantly fights with his wife Pauline and wonders why he decided to marry her in the first place. He sees women as a price to be won and when his curiosity runs out, he leaves. Also, the humiliation he felt after the three men watched him and Darlene have sex. This has led him to become an alcoholic, to free his mind of the pain he has endured in his life and give him this feeling of freedom to do whatever he pleased without suffering the consequences for it. Hurt people will hurt others to feel what they feel and that is what Cholly has done. He has hurt the people that he loves or just random strangers to feel his confusion, anger, and sadness he has accumulated throughout his life.

The most significant symbol that stood out was the movie theater that Mrs. Breedlove constantly goes to. Throughout the section of the book, Pauline would go to the movies to escape the troubles in her life. She would start to equate the the lives she sees on the silver screen to her real life, thinking this is how it should be and anything foreign to that she would come to hate. It come to the conflict of herself and society. Pauline is not confident within herself due to the ridicule she has received from her own peers due to her being southern. Pauline’s marriage is also in the equation because, while it started off passionately and full of love, it would soon turn into constant fighting and bickering. Because of the image she believes she should uphold, Pauline holds a certain standard where not even her own children are good enough for her. She gives the attention to another family and their child; giving that child the love that Pecola wants from her. Society’s beauty and family standards have caused Pauline to be judgemental and sometimes even heartless towards her children and there is no healthy relationship between her and Cholly.

Nish arrives at a dilapidated gas station to charge her car and sees a museum called the Black Museum. The owner, Rolo Haynes tells her that it is not for the faint of heart. The museum is full of neuro-technology Rolo has a background in and tells her this story of how people would sign up for free health care if they consent to doing medical experiments. Rolo shows a prototype for an implant for finding out the symptoms of patients. The diagnoser was able to help the doctor save his patients and also have a good sex life. However, he could not save this one patient and experienced the death of that patient. He started to enjoy feeling the pain of others and got addicted to it. Soon he would start to mutilate himself in order to have that feeling of pain after he was ordered to not work with patients. He would end up fighting a random homeless person to inflict pain in order to find that high that would end up putting him into a coma. Rolo goes into another story about Jack and Carrie, an interracial couple that had a son. Carrie gets hit by a truck and goes into a coma. Rolo tells him about this device that can help Carrie feel what Jack feels. Soon it doesn’t seem to be a good idea after their relationship starts to fall apart. Soon Rolo develops a device so that Jack can put Carrie on pause. Jack gets into another relationship with someone else and Carrie does not like it. Rolo suggests that Carrie should be deleted but Jack does not agree. Rolo then suggests that he’d transfer Carrie into a stuffed toy. Because of that situation, Rolo was fired from his position and to this day Carrie is still in the stuffed toy. Finally, they go to the “main attraction”. In the background during the entire episode, there were news reels of a murder of a weather reporter and the person who killed her. The hologram is of the convicted murderer who was put to death. Turns out that he did not commit the murder, but they went ahead and killed him. Rolo transmitted his consciousness into the hologram. Rolo was making profit off of Clayton’s pain; Nish finally reveals herself who she really is and her purpose in coming to the Black Museum. Clayton was her father and she came to get revenge for the harsh treatment of her father. This episode deals with the racism people of color deal with in the criminal justice system. How it connects to The Bluest Eye is that constant racism the characters face on a day to day basis. People seem to enjoy their pain a suffering that is being showcased just like the Black Museum. For example, Pecola and her family live in poverty and don’t seem to get any government assistance. Because of this, it can lead people to a life of crime.

In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, she starts off with an excerpt of the children’s book Dick and Jane. It is a family with 2 children, a cat, and the dog. They are all very happy and the children are playing outdoors. Morrison wanted to start off this story with this as a comparison with the characters of Claudia and Pecola, whose lives are not like Dick and Jane’s. Primarily stories in the 1950s are a happy white family; the “American Dream” so to speak. When people of color see this image, they wonder about their stories and why they are not being told. Claudia is faced with constantly having figures to look up to that don’t look like her. For example, every year for Christmas her parent give her a white baby doll. She destroys the baby dolls to figure out why they are so great. She wonders why she is not considered beautiful and not admired as the other girls. Pecola prays for blues so that she can be seen as beautiful and someone worthy of love. The Dick and Jane story gives the readers a startlingly contrast of the story that is going to be told in the novel; showing that everyone’s story is not the same and that everyone should have the chance to tell their story and have someone to look up to. Claudia and Pecola clearly don’t have that with what they are given. For example, Pecola constantly drinks milk out of the Shirley Temple cup to admire it while Claudia does not really understand Shirley Temple’s appeal.

In this section of the book, not only does the season bring the winter it brought new characters. Claudia, Freida, and Pecola are introduced to a new classmate named Maureen Peal. Everyone is very fascinated with her light skin tone, long brown hair, and green eyes (an indication that she is biracial). Claudia and Freida are baffled and a little envious of the new girl and start to think up horrible nicknames for her. Their anger is a way to hide their jealousy. They are officially introduced when they decided to walk home together and Freida stopped a group of boys bullying Pecola. After the group of girls get acquainted, Maureen shares with them that she recently started her menstrual cycle; something Pecola has also recently started experiencing. Pecola asks why and how it happens when suddenly the conversation began to go left. Maureen asked the girls if they ever saw a naked man and called Pecola out about seeing her own father naked; an allegation the group of boys were bullying Pecola about earlier. Claudia and Freida defended Pecola and that is when Maureen started to taunt them the way the boys were taunting Pecola: calling them black and ugly. This incident in the story is similar to the Asian American poem The Secret Life in America. It is read as a speaker recalls a conversation he had with his brother about how to survive in a country where you are constantly rejected and hated because of your race and where you came from. In the poem it mentions how other Asians will not unite together since they also face the same predicament. This particular incident in the poem kind of shows that lack of unity in the black community. Color-ism has been an issue in the black community for a while and the result is people turning against each other. Another one of the characters introduced in the book is Geraldine, another black woman who is married and has a son Junior. She will not allow Junior to play with the “niggers” since they are poor, uneducated, and will try to hurt Junior because of his privilege. This lack of unity in the black and Asian communities has made people turn against each other even though they face same discrimination due to their race. Because of the color-ism, it has made Claudia and Pecola think that they are not beautiful because of their blackness.

In this section of the story, it introduces sisters Freida and Claudia. Their mother and father took in a young girl named Pecola after her father burned down their house in a drunken state. Both struggle with the idea of beauty and love. For Claudia, she wonders why people do not understand her. Every Christmas, her family gives her a white baby doll but she does not find joy or beauty in dolls. Instead, she rather have the simplicity of sitting in her grandma’s kitchen listening to her grandfather play the violin: “I want to sit on the low stool in Big Mama’s kitchen with my lap full of lilacs and listen to Big Papa play his violin for me alone.” Claudia would rather feel something rather ownership of something not valuable. For Pecola, her life is more traumatic. She lives in a turbulent household where her parents get into fist fights and her older brother constantly runs away. She does not think that she is beautiful because she is black and that she won’t be loved because of her blackness. Since she is always in a place full of conflict, Pecola wonders what love is and how can someone love her. In both characters’ situations, it relates to the poems like Dear Uncle Sam and We Do Not Know Her Name. The reason why is both deal with identity and wanting to be loved and accepted. Dear Uncle Sam reads like a letter to the political character about how he as a black man is not the ideal American in a white man’s view. He also deals with his homosexuality as another reason for not being accepted. We Do Not Know Her Name deals with not being seen and accepted for who she is: a black woman. The speakers and the characters in The Bluest Eye want something so simple yet is difficult to obtain: acceptance. Being black in America is still difficult and even dangerous. People are still murdered simply for being black. Both and characters and speakers deal with their blackness being considered as a weapon and ugly and is something that is getting in the way of obtaining acceptance that they dearly want to possess.

The most important symbol is, cliche as it may seem, the photograph of the speaker’s parents. In the poem it read like the picture is an actual scene the speaker is describing. Only at the end of the poem is that the speaker is not there with them. He/she is somewhere else without them. After reading it seems that the most important symbol is that simple photograph because the speaker remembers that day and its events specifically and wishes he/she is there with them. The poem can be interpreted as the speaker has left his/her home country and has gone to America for a better life hoping to raise enough money to bring their parents to America. The speaker is reminiscing a time where the speaker is comforted by being in their presence. Now that they are in America, life has been difficult without them and not what he/she expected America to be like. Looking at the photograph gives them comfort. Another interpretation, since the title is The Last Photograph of My Parents, is that it could be that the parents have died while the speaker was in America and that photograph is the last thing the speaker can remember them by. This photograph has an importance to the speaker as in wherever the parents are, that is home for him/her. The speaker feels lost without them and feels left out of the wonderful he/she has of their parents while looking at the photograph: “I am nowhere to be found, neither in the foreground or background.” Losing a parent or being separated from a parent is tough thing for anyone to go through and someone can relate to in this poem. People reading the poem does not have to be an immigrant to know that feeling of being separated from family members in a place you have no knowledge of, do not know the people or language, and probably does not understand the culture. Also, being in a place where people do not understand you or maybe even resent because you are from another country. This poem can be relatable to anyone going through this ordeal and understand the sadness.

A Temporary Matter is about and Indian-American couple that is still grieving over the loss of their baby. Since then, they have avoided communicating to each other until Shoba comes up with a way to talk to each other again by using the blackouts that have been happening in their neighborhood. This author has put no protagonist or antagonist in her story because it is to showcase a couple trying to salvage a marriage a marriage that is already broken. It is subtle how the author writes the little key points to show the reader that this marriage isn’t going to work. For example, Shoba refuses to go into the office where Shukumar works because it was going to be the nursery for their baby. Shukumar also tries to avoid as much as possible by going to his office to eat his dinner knowing Shoba won’t go in there. Shoba uses the four days of revealing her secrets to prepare herself and Shukumar to tell him that she has found an apartment and that she is moving out. After Shoba tells him this, Shukumar tells her the sex of their baby even though she made him promise not to tell her. As the author writes: “He promised her that day that he would never tell Shoba, because he still loved her then, and it was the one thing in her life that she had wanted to be a surprise.” Now that it’s clear after he tells her the sex of their baby, he does not love Shoba anymore. The ritual they had made was a last ditch effort to save their marriage but in the end, they can salvage what is already broken and have shared their last secrets before moving on as individuals which is what the author is trying to showcase in her story: there are no good or bad guys in a broken marriage.