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the novel is on Pecola Breedlove, another young black girl who lives in very different circumstances from Claudia and her sister. Not only is her mother Pauline distant and aloof, but her father Cholly Breedlove is also unreliable for any comfort or support, and instead he drinks excessively and later rapes Pecola. Because Pecola, just as her mother, yearns to be seen as beautiful, she longs for the blue eyes of the most admired child in the 1940s: Shirley Temple. After visiting Soaphead Church, a "spiritualist" who claims he can make Pecola's eyes blue, Pecola believes that she has the bluest eyes in the world and now everyone will love her. Obviously, Pecola is the truest kind of victim. Unlike Claudia, who possesses the love of her family, Pecola is powerless to reject the unachievable values esteemed by those around her and finally descends into insanity. The Bluest Eye portrays the tragedy that results when African Americans have no resources to fight the standards presented to them by the white culture and when they lose cultural/ethic identity during the process of identification in the mainstream societyI. The Rejection of the Mainstream Culture According to Toni Morrison, Pecola is just the victim, who is only 12 year-old and always lives in the shadow of her parents’ cruelty, neighbors’ indifference and friends’ ridicule. Therefore, she longs for a change, and favor of others. The opening paragraph of the novel deals with a white American ideal of the family unit—cohesive, happy, with love enough to spare to pets. It is a fairy tale world, a dream world, childlike in extreme—it is desirable, but for the blacks, it is unattainable. After the orderliness of the first paragraph, the same passage is reproduced as the 2nd paragraph but without punctuation marks, and as the 3rd paragraph without both punctuation and word division. Thus 3 possible family situations are presented: first Geraldine’s (a counterfeit of the idealized white family), further down the MacTeers’, and the bottom the Breedlove’s. The mother-father-Dick-Jane concept (the idealized white family) is finally transmuted to the Mrs. Breedlove-Cholly-Sammy-Pecola situation. The transmutation is Morrison’s indirect criticism of the white majority for the black family’s situation and for what is taught to the black child in school, as evidenced by the primer paragraph, that in no way relates to the child’ s reality. In this sense, Morrison’s readers are revealed that the blacks are attacked emotionally from childhood, living in two impossible worlds: the fairy tale world of lies when they are in contact with the white world and the equally incredible, grim world of black life. In W.E.B. Du Bois’ words, the blacks are born with a veil and gifted with second-sight in this American world. They look at their selves through the eyes of the whites, and measure their soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. From this profoundly stirring beginning, Morrison advances to an equally moving examination of the fate of the blacks, especially Pecola’s life—her unloving childhood, her repudiation by nearly everyone she encounters, and finally the complete disintegration of self. In fact, her tragedy is doomed at the very beginning since “they (the Breedloves)…believed they were ugly…their ugliness was unique,” and they cannot do anything but “accepted it without question…took the ugliness in them hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the