Finding Community and Identity in Works of Toni Morrison.

             Who"re you, outsider? Ask me who am I.

             -Langston Hughes, "Visitors to the Black Belt".

             Toni Morrison"s The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Tar Baby explore different types of communities. Such communities differ in race, class and gender respectively. They also include different learned biases and prejudices. In each, one or more of Morrison"s characters struggle with the sense of there own identity within the community. Throughout this paper I will explore the different types of communities and take a closer look at the characters in which cannot identify with themselves or others within them.

             In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, one of the most prevalent themes explored was that of one"s dependency on society for identification, self value, and feelings of self worth. In an interview, Morrison indicated that her plan was to take love and the effects of its scarcity in the world as her major themes, concentrating on the individual loves of her characters, especially those of an enclosed community. (Kantz, 426) By constructing the chain of events that answered the question of how Pecola Breedlove was cast as the social outcast in her community, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye attempted to satisfy the more difficult question of why. By using what seemed like tangents in the story, the reader was shown examples of how forces beyond human control such as nature, an omniscient being and primarily a legacy of rejection have come together to establish the heritage of desolation that has been passed on to Pecola Breedlove.

             A pattern of precedence was pieced together in the story, showing the seeds of Pecola's present barrenness to have been planted in the lives of preceding generations. By profiling the lives of Soaphead Church and Pauline Breedlove, Morrison made a case for the validity of generational curses.