Malchicks, Chellovecks, and Ptitsas

I have just started my next book, A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess, and I must say it is quite interesting thus far. It’s about a rebellious young boy named Alex of about fifteen years of age. He and his three friends, Pete, Georgie, and Dim, roam about a New York City set in the future about forty years ahead of its time. Alex is a power hungry person who will go at unreasonable lengths to prove to his cronies that he is in control. The four prowl the city at night causing all kinds of trouble. The most interesting thing, however, is the unusual language of the novel. Alex acts as the narrator, and speaks in somewhat of a made up, or less civilized version of English. He uses words such as viddy, chelloveck, tolchock, and gloopy. When I first started reading, it was extremely difficult to understand what was going on, and what Alex was saying. However, by about the third or fourth chapter I became hooked to the story line and was slowly beginning to understand what was being said. For example, viddy deals with seeing or vision, ptitsas refer to females, and krovvy is blood. So even though the words were foreign to my eyes until I picked up A Clockwork Orange, the context and plot allowed me to translate the words in my mind as I read. Referring to Sparknotes every once in a while, to make sure my readings were correct didn’t hurt either. I thought I should refer to an online source as well to find the meaning of these made up words, and why Burgess decided to write in such an unusual fashion. It turns out that the made up words are called nadsat. It is a combination of misconstrued Russian and American slang. While I was reading, I could tell that some of the words, such as chelloveck, were derived from a Russian type language. The reasoning behind the use of nadsat is for the reader to become more cordial with Alex and be able to think like him. Nevertheless, once you really get into the storyline, A Clockwork Orange becomes an easy read. Nadsat adds substance to the book and isn’t much of a problem to understand at all after the first few chapters.

Finished The Bluest Eye...

After just having finished The Bluest Eye, it was overly depressing to say the least. Throughout the entire novel, all Pecola wanted was a pair of blue eyes so she could feel pretty, but instead she was given numerous trials of hardship. From being made fun of, to having a dysfunctional family, having few friends, and being raped by her own father, Pecola’s life is one of misery and pain with little hope of condolence. The first bit of light that she sees is at the end of the book when she gets her blue eyes, but even then only she can see them and is not satisfied because they are not the bluest. In addition, she was forced to kill a dog unknowingly so that she would believe her eyes were blue. Since the book is written in a scattered format and seems to go nowhere and give even less hope, a few big questions went through my mind; what is the point of the novel and what is Morrison trying to say? After thinking long and hard as to the answer of these questions, I came up with the conclusion that she was trying to get away from the typical happy ending novels and show that things can’t always turn out the way we want, which is what happens in the real world. No matter how good a person someone is life may not treat them kindly. Pecola is a character who was simply born into an unjust life, with a criminal father and an “I don’t care” relationship between her parents. Nevertheless, she still tried to look on the bright side of things and make the best of her situation. With all the things that went wrong in her life, the thing that she wanted most was beauty. Other than a tale of hardship, The Bluest Eye is also a demonstration of racism in mid twentieth century America. Pecola sees how all white girls like Shirley Temple are revered for their blond hair and blue eyes, so she believes that the only way she can be pretty is to look like that. It is society’s fault that young black girls like her were not able to be comfortable in their own skin.

Since Oprah chose The Bluest Eye as a selection for her book club, I thought I would read a few reviews by the members of the book club and see how they reacted. One reader explains how “[the book] taught me to love my brothers and sisters for their humanity--not their color, religion, sexual persuasion but because we are one in the eyes of our beholder”. I believe this to be the prime focus of the novel after reading the reviews. Morrison wanted people to realize that others should be judged on their humanity, rather than what they look like. She gave examples of all different kinds of people, both black and white. There were good white people and bad white people; there were good black people and bad black people. The book showed that people can be either good or bad and it has nothing to do with their skin. The review further expresses this point by stressing that we are all human and are seen as that in the eyes of God. The reviewer believes we should judge people on merit and nothing else. Not having known why Oprah chose this for her book club, I could guess that she had similar experiences as a young black girl and wanted the public to be able to see the pain that her and many children went and still go through.

Autumn

I’m about sixty pages into my first novel at the culmination of the portion of the book called Autumn. The story is about a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove at the age of eleven. Set in 1941, the novel has a strong theme of racism, which the naïve girl does not yet comprehend. There have been three separate sections of the novel so far that do not have much relation to one another at first sight, but have a common theme. Pecola is introduced as a young girl that has been given up by her family because her parents can no longer care for her. With the new family she witnesses a mother who does nothing but complain and care little for her children. Running through a field with her two new friends Frieda and Claudia, Pecola notices that she is bleeding. After discovering that she is experiencing menstruation, Claudia tells her that she can now have a baby, but must have love to do so. In the second section, Pecola’s birth parents constantly fought to the point that their children hated them and wanted the father dead. The kids ran away and when the mother had had enough and the dad was in jail, it became time to let Pecola go for the time being. Another thing that should be noted about this section is how much the author mentions how ugly the family is and that Pecola wants blue eyes like Shirley Temple. The final section up to this point shows how the young girl has become friendly with three prostitutes who live nearby. Although many sources, like this one, say that Pecola is searching for beauty, I believe that she is really trying to find love, or even be loved. She has experienced a few different types up to this point and the driving thought right now is that she must be pretty to find love. In the article, Morrison expresses how Pecola is searching for inner beauty in a racist world that has not yet learned to accept varying colors of skin. I can see how this is evident in her prayers for blue eyes. She just wants to accepted and does not believe she can do so in her own skin. So while the sources say she wants to be pretty deep down, she unknowingly wants to experience the love of another person in accordance with self acceptance.