Many unfortunate events took place during Cholly’s upbringing that had a direct negative affect on

Claudia, another character who goes through a similar situation compared to Pecola. She is a young girl who came out from a loving family and is intrusive, yet sensitive.

Besides the inherent self-confident issue, the outside voice from community is also affecting Pecola’s view. For example, in the “accident” when Pecola went into Junior’s house, Junior killed the cat and impute to Pecola. His mother, Geraldine, saw Pecola was holding the dead cat. Without any thought and didn’t even ask for the truth, Geraldine simply called Pecola a “nastylittle black bitch.” This event, again, reinforces Pecola’s view of what beauty means.

As a child, he was not loved by his mother. She prefered her cat to her own son. Junior saw this at an early age and “spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86). Junior locked Pecola in a room, becoming the perpetrator with the same turn of attitude as Cholly. When he saw that the cat liked Pecola, he threw the cat, killing it, because the thing his mother loved more than himself loved her. Pecola’s wish could be paralleled to the cat. It had blue eyes, and was loved dearly by someone, which could explain the attention she gave to the cat. Junior even said, “Gimme my cat! (90). Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with the cat and even tortured it, but with it being the only connection to his mother, he called it his own. Pecola’s dream, or having the same attention as the cat, was killed when the cat was killed. Junior was not loved by his mother, only taken care of to live. She did not “allow her baby, Junior, to cry…[she] did not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). This unlove for her family caused Junior to be victimized, and then alter his ways, and become the perpetrator. Pecola is the victim in the rage of Junior, only because his mother did not love him. She wanted someone to be kind to her, and love her, but that was only met with

In the aftermath, there is a dialogue presented between Pecola and an imaginary friend. The dialogue includes conflicted feelings of Pecola’s rape, and her deluded thoughts of her wish for blue eyes has been granted. She believes that the changes in behavior of the people around her are because of her new eyes, and not the news of her rape. Claudia speaks for a final time, and describes the recent phenomenon of pecola’s insanity. She also suggests that Cholly, (who had since died), may have shown Pecola the only affection he could by raping her. Claudia believed that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a way to make themselves feel beautiful and happier.

To better understand the mindset of the characters and society as a whole during the early 1940s, one must first analyze the setting of the novel. This allows for the reader to understand what causes the characters to think and act the way they do throughout the novel. For instance, the story is set in the rural south of Lorain, Ohio, during the fall of 1941 to the summer of 1942. During this time period, the Great Depression was coming to an end and World War II was breaking out throughout the world. People, especially African Americans, were seeking economic security and opportunities for mobility. This can be seen with the MacTeers, a poor African American family, who all collect coal at Zick’s Coal Company to earn more money. It can also be seen when Pecola Breedlove’s parents, Pauline and Cholly, move up north to Ohio in search of better

After his great aunt's death, he is humiliated by two white men while having his first sexual encounter with Darlene. They force him to continue having sex with her while they watch and laugh. He couldn't strike back at the white men because, "such an emotion would have destroyed him" (150), he bottled up his emotions and transferred them to his hatred of women in general. The reader could feel and understand Cholly's description of the emotions running through his head when he describes the incident a day after. He could not save Darlene from the taunting and laughs of the white men, and therefore was resigned to loathing her, hating "the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence" (151).

Cholly Breedlove grew up in a loveless environment where he was abandoned and left on a junk heap by his own mother. As a child he never knew his father, meeting him only when he was fourteen. His father never cared about him. Cholly was raised by a great aunt who loved him but, he did not respect her. Cholly quit school and went to work at a grain store where he met Blue, a kindly older man who was a father figure to him. For the first time in his life, Cholly felt the love of a father. Soon after his great aunt died just as Cholly was coming into puberty. At her funeral he met a young woman named Darlene, whom he had his first sexual experience. However it wasn't a pleasurable experience because two white men found them and forced them to

Because of racism and her own personal background, Pauline neglects her family and allows Pecola to be victimized. One reason that Pauline turns out the way she does is that she always felt inadequate. Growing up Pauline blamed her foot for her constant source of humiliation. “The easiest thing to do would be to build a case out of her foot.” “That is what she herself did” (Morrison 110). In addition, once she moved to Ohio she had to contend with regional and social class barriers to norms of beauty that she had never imagined. For example, she couldn't keep up with latest fashion and this takes a big toll on her spirit.

Both Claudia and the narrator show sympathy. Claudia wants to show Cholly’s love for Pecola even though he raped her, and the narrator provides Cholly's story to understand why he raped her and how it fit into his life.

Pauline eventually meets Cholly, who is Pecola’s biological father, and they fall in love. "He seemed to relish her company and even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful; he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in the world." (Morrison, p. 115)

Pauline’s loss of a tooth destroys her chances of achieving her perception of white beauty, as shown through her obsession with looking like Jean Harlow, ultimately forcing Pecola to search for her own beauty to achieve the acceptance she was unable to receive because of her mother’s lack of love. During her pregnancy, Pauline’s loneliness contributed to her focusing her life on movies for entertainment because Cholly began to resist her total dependence on him by not being home as often. The movies, however, introduced her to the ideas of romantic love and physical beauty. After living a life attached to movies, “she was never able..to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty” (122). The importance of

The thirst for evil that Cholly Breedlove obtains in his adolescent life at the hand of Blue Jack, and the hatred towards women he gains in his teenage years from Darlene, come together later in his adult life, and lead up to Cholly raping his daughter, Pecola. A thirst for evil held by Cholly Breedlove forms when he and Blue Jack ate the heart of a watermelon at a Fourth of July picnic, at which Cholly witnesses a demonic scene making Cholly prefer the devil over God. Cholly, sitting on the ground at the picnic, looks up to a man holding a watermelon above his head, and thinks to himself, “It must be the devil who looks like that–holding the world in his hands, ready to dash it to the ground and spill the red guts so niggers could eat the sweet, warm insides. If the devil did look like that, Cholly preferred him”

When she first met Cholly, she felt that her savior had come to take her home and to protect her from all the ravages of the impending storms. But Cholly was only a man, a man that carried the scars of abandonment on a trash heap by his mother and rejection at a crap game by his father. Cholly, who tried to anesthetize himself with booze, for the humiliation and degradation he experienced by sneering white men, with flashlights, who stole his manhood. In the beginning, filled with the promise of young love, things went well for Cholly and Pauline in the North. However, as time went by, the colors of Pauline's youth begin to fade as her loneliness consumes her, and she is forced into the picture show for her tutoring.

“fear of life” (100). Pauline has always despised her daughter, when she sees Pecola just after her birth, she remarks: “Head full of pretty hair but Lord she was ugly” (98). But she (Pauline) cares for the infant she takes care of then feels ashamed of her child and abuses her, like attacking her when she unintentionally spills a blueberry pie at the Fishers. Pauline fails utterly as a mother when she distrusts Pecola’s account of the first time her father rapes her. Her disbelief prevents her from protecting her daughter, who will be sexually assaulted again. Similarly, Pecola’s father, Cholly, who has endured devastating experiences in his life, is incapable of fatherly behavior. He is neglectful and abusive with his children. As an oppressed

His possibly mentally ill mother tried to kill him when he was just four days old, but his loving Aunt did save him and take him under her genuine care. Cholly even had a fatherly figure: Blue Jack. All the parental-like figures were apparent in his life. They just were underappreciated. Cholly did not have the mindset to stop and think that his deadbeat parents were not worth worrying about and should be appreciative of his aunt when he was young. But growing older, the thought should have crossed his mind. For Cholly Breedlove, the "apple barrels" or "barrel makers" are not the things influencing his lifestyle and choices, its the apple itself. Cholly was a dangerously free man, meaning that he did not have any orders to follow, boundaries to stay in, or morals to care/think about. Having a detailed history of his childhood does not excuse him, but explain why he became the man that raped his eleven-year-old daughter. He took his deadbeat parent's qualities and shunned out his aunt and blue jack's. He had become the man his father was. He was unappreciative of his aunt's love and was almost blind to the privileges he had. The only things about his background that get described in full detail were the negative and sad memories. There is no doubt that Cholly lived a close to perfect life. If he had left the thoughts of his dad behind, he would not be the confused, semi-heartless, dangerously free man he developed to be. When it comes to Pecola, he becomes tongue-tied, frozen and unable to care for her properly. "What could he do for her – ever? What give her? What say to her? What could a burned-out black man say to the hunched back of his eleven-year-old daughter?" (p.g. 161). Cholly would have had this nurturing quality if he did not consistently shun out the love he was getting from his aunt. "the love would move him to fury. How dare she love him? Hadn't she any sense at all? What was he supposed to do about that? Return