Wow. The end of that book. After reading it, I needed some answers and was pleased by Morrison’s honest and surprisingly thorough analysis of her own work. I needed to know why Morrison could blind a “poor little girl” (Morrison, 190) like Pecola Breelove and leave her insane, friendless, fatherless—childless, even—talking to (what I assume was) herself for the rest of her days. I needed to know who did it to her. Was it her own perverted desires? Was it what society told her? Was it Soaphead, her town or her father? Was I or people “like me” to blame? Morrison didn’t answer any of these questions, but she wasn’t supposed to. By carefully constructing a story in the “language worthy of [her] culture,” (Morrison, 216) Morrison is able to open our eyes, blue eyes or not, to a world many of us don’t understand. 
Pecola's pride at having blue eyes at the end of The Bluest Eye is one of the more horrific passages.
One strategy I was impressed by was Morrison’s ability to write her story in such a disjointed yet complete way. (Maybe, like what Soaphead said in his letter, not a complete story, but a complete story.) She presented characters, allowed us to judge them and then completely changed our minds. Cholly, for example, went from a wife-beating, alcoholic and inept father to a laughing, irresistible young man and back again. He transforms into just a young boy who is then “’rape[d]’ by the whitemen [sic]” (Morrison, 215), becomes a man who commits an unspeakable crime but is eulogized in a sense as the only one who loved Pecola enough, “enough to touch her, envelop her, give something of himself to her.” (Morrison, 204) What are we supposed to do with that? Morrison’s writing style has the beautiful and at times frustrating effect of forcing its readers to figure out what we want or need to think about what we’ve just read. In the way she’s structured the time in her narrative, she can start a passage “so it was on a Saturday afternoon, in the thin light of spring” (Morrison, 161) and have her audience tense at the anticipation of a scene they’ve wanted to avoid for the entirety of the novel, Pecola’s rape scene. And, echoing this sentence, she can sum up the entire depressing, hopeless conclusion of that young girl’s fate with another “So it was,” (Morrison, 204) and the sense that Pecola’s story is only one sad (albeit extreme) story of many. So, although Morrison writes that it was music alone that could have expressed Cholly’s freedom as a young, runaway, she shows just how much writing can say. That in Cholly’s case, for example, not “only a musician” but a writer “would sense, know, without even knowing that he knew, that Cholly was free.” (Morrison, 159) Morrison’s writing is lyrical, at times musical, “speakerly, aural, colloquial,” (Morrison, 215) but above all it is powerful. Morrison’s writing as “the disclosure of secrets, secrets ‘we’ shared and those withheld from us by ourselves and by the world outside...” (Morrison, 212)—writing she wasn’t even fully satisfied with as she mentions throughout her afterword—had the ability to share an entire town and its hardships and encourage all those who read it to think not only about what they were doing but to look at the “stories” of their lives from all angles.
How different would The Bluest Eye have been if we were only given the perspective of one person? As disjointed and unclear as this picture of this one man?
I couldn’t read The Bluest Eye without thinking about its impact on the world and all those who read it. I couldn’t forget the “Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature” on its cover and my impression of Morrison as a highly contemplative, calculative and soulful writer. But what about the impact of other books or writings? What about those pieces that never get published or even read by anyone but the author? A good example is Soaphead’s letter to God, which is presumably a reflexive letter written in actuality to a man highly discomforted by his present state and feelings. Soaphead’s letter is therapeutic: it explained his past and current situation—he even says “it is necessary that I identify myself to you clearly” (Morrison, 177); it revealed his and his family’s failings; and it granted him the opportunity to explain something that no one would ever listen to, not “the newspapers” or the “people [who] whispered.” (Morrison, 181) His letter ends with him feeling proud of his accomplishments, however misguided and twisted they may be. And although many people would say that Soaphead doesn’t deserve this strange redemption, his writing was able to give him that. In this way, writing is something which helps us to bare our own souls, air our own problems, reveal things about ourselves that even we didn’t know. I think this is what is most important and what both Morrison’s and “Soaphead’s” writings come to: the ability of writing to say something you could never just say. It’s the mindset you get in when you sit down and read, ready to be changed by what you’re reading or the way you feel when you get ready to really write anything and everything that you’re thinking. Writing is an honesty that comes out of deep thinking mixed with spontaneity and a desire to show what you really mean. I’m glad Morrison was able to show me the world and ideas of The Bluest Eye so beautifully.
Post Secret is kind of like Soaphead's therapeutic writing practice. People anonymously write anything they're thinking and send them in for people to read. In this way, they can write things they'd never say to anyone else. (I don't agree with this one, but I thought it was kind of funny for our class!)
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