The Ethical Literary Interpretation Of The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison(1931—), the first black American woman writer awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, is now one of the most outstanding novelists on the contemporary American as well as the world literary stage. The Bluest Eye is her first novel. As the novel involves abundant moral factors such as self-identity, parenthood, cultural dislocation and the human-nature relationship etc, this thesis, based on the theory of ethical literary criticism, tries to analyze the moral factors in The Bluest Eye through three layers of relationship, namely man-himself relationship, man-man relationship and man-nature relationship as well for the sake of digging out Morrison's ethical thoughts and moral principles and exploring out the reasons that lead to the tragedy of the figures in the novel.This paper is divided into three chapters except the introduction and the conclusion. The Introduction is about Toni Morrison and her literary achievements and the ethical literary theory and this theory's application in the interpretation of The Bluest Eye. Chapter One makes exact analysis on Morrison's ethical pursuit and proposal of self-balance on the man-himself relationship by taking Father Cholly and Daughter Pecola as the sample. Chapter Two explores in details Morrison's ethical pursuit of love in terms of man-man relationship by taking Mother Polly and Daughter Pecola for the mother-daughter relationship and between the black and the black in the black community for communal relationship as examples. Chapter Three discusses Morrison's ethical appeal for harmony in the man-nature relationship by taking such representations as seasons, specific objects and animals as the cutting points. It is referred in the conclusion that Morrison pays great concerns and makes a detailed description on the problems of black community and black race and various relationships among blacks and comprehensively and concretely interprets her moral faith and ethical pursuits: self-balance, mutual love and harmony. And these three also can be viewed as the prescript for her black compatriots to solve the problems of the blacks.