The effectiveness of the characters in The Bluest Eye, as well as the personal chord that the narrative touches in the reader, is mostly due to Morrison’s superb narrative style. She uses a composite stream-of-consciousness format to introduce characters in a non-specific fashion, and then uses a variety of other perspectives to give the characters depth and meaning as individuals. The journal, or diary, format of Mrs. Breedlove’s narrative for example, broken up by first-person omniscient explanation, is a perfect example. Morrison does not disturb the continuity of her text, but allows the reader to move further into the mind of Mrs. Breedlove’s character than could have ever been accomplished by simple narrative. The use of these seperate tools in various parts of the text can be most easily identified as a sub-style, which supplements the narrative of Claudia, while bringing the characters to life.

            But by far the most effective places that this sub-style is utilised is in the chapter concerning Whitcomb, and that which involves the dialogue between Pecola and her unborn child. Whitcomb’s chapter can be termed superficially the rantings of a mad sociopath. Looking closer, Morrison shows the brilliant ability to reproduce a complex  theme through the incredibly disturbing character of the pedophile. The reader sees Whitcomb as a product of the incest that came up through the generations of his family who attempted to keep their blood as white as possible. In reaching for the ideal of white social stature and “beauty,” their blood was corrupted until such a person was created that was as far from the original goal as the family could have gotten; a person whose entire life is based on lies, to himself and to others, and on the perversions in which he takes pleasure.

            Morrison leaves an in-depth look at Pecola out of the novel until the end. Her story is heart-wrenching as it is, but Morrison effectively makes it more so by making the reader wait for a look at her side. When it finally comes, it comes in an utterly unexpected form: a conversation between the raped girl and her unborn child. The utterly destroyed innocence and ravaged mind of this girl comes through in the dialogue, which mostly concerns the subject of the new blue eyes she was promised. This last chapter allows Morrison to make the point that, no matter who is to blame for the vicious cycle of self-perpetuating hatred with which the characters in the novel cope, the casualties of that hatred are not deserving of the punishment they recieve. The cycle becomes a kind of social Darwinism which takes only the weak and the innocent.

            Besides these special features of the novel which provide such important insight into the characters, some attention need be given to the main narration. The fact that Claudia is chosen as the narrator is perhaps not as interesting to the overall effect as the fact that Morrison chose a child. As Morrison tells the reader in the Afterword, she chose a child for the reason that a level of intimacy could be achieved with a child that could not be achieved with an adult character. The trust that is built into the stereotype of a child would help to create that intimacy from the first page on. The use of a child also provides the stream-of-consciousness; allowing the novel to flow in such a way that allows for flexibility in transitions from subject to subject and character to character.