Formal Structure and Music Theory in 'The Bluest Eye'

As Trudier Harris has pointed out, Morrison’s use of suppressed popular communicative forms – visual, oral, musical, and more – is an integral part of her uncovering “discredited” knowledge (Morrison’s deployment of the folk traditional-bearers and the transmission of popular memory, by Trudier Harris). What is more, Morrison has stated that her narrative “effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music...” (Interview 408) and The Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort “to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization” (Morrison, “Language” 371).

In fact, in referring to the ‘St. Louis Blues’ in The Bluest Eye, the song Claudia’s mother used to sing during her childhood, Morrison…