Rejection is a part of life, and Morrison intends to show that. She uses the idea of rejection to show different characters in their isolation and alienation—and in particular how they respond to that rejection. For Morrison, rejection is a motivating force, not a death sentence. She believes that the characters should respond to it and adapt in some way—be it to improve themselves, rise above the rejection, or turn toward a darker path. This novel highlights the different types of rejections and people's different reactions to it.
For Pecola, she feels rejected because she doesn't have any semblance of Westernized beauty, at least not in her own eyes. She prays and wishes to have the bluest eyes so that she could be accepted by her peers. Her rejection leads to her yearning for a change in herself, but it eventually brings her to her own acceptance.
For characters like Claudia, however, she chooses instead to reject those same societal values that Pecola so desperately desires. She disfigures her Americanized dolls and wishes to push herself as far away from western beauty as she can.
Other characters respond by transforming themselves or others around them to be accepted—attempting to fit into a mold they can never match. Everyone's responses to rejection show how people cope and the potential dangers inherent in conformity.
The Bluest Eye includes individual stories of rejection and also shows how rejection shapes American society overall through discrimination and injustice. Rejection emerges as one aspect of alienation and isolation, as characters such as Pecola try to manipulate prejudice to further their own goals.
The blue eyes of the title are the specific object of desire for Pecola, who imagines that if she possessed this physical feature she would be accepted and even loved. The eyes are part of her overall longing to be lighter-skinned, if not actually white; this stands for her rejection of her own African American identity.
Claudia, in contrast, understands the social values embodied in elevating blue-eyed people; her rejection of those values is encapsulated in her destruction of “white” plastic dolls. She extends that rejection, unfortunately, to light-skinned people, attacking Maureen as though she were such a doll.
Rejection also emerges in the relationship between Geraldine and her son, Junior. Geraldine aims to reject the negative connotations she understands in African American identity by taking a superior attitude. She then tries to shape her son into her image of perfection, but the result is his alienation from those standards and from her influence. While the other boys reject him, he in turn rejects social controls, exhibiting violent behavior and then lying about it.
In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, rejection is explored in the ways in which it impacts individual black people and the greater black community. On a broad scale, white society/the white-controlled government of the United States has rejected the very humanity of black people. This rejection has resulted in negative social and economic effects that are felt on an individual level for black characters in the novel.
For Junior, the middle-class, light-skinned son of Geraldine, this rejection is experienced in his inability to connect with the surrounding black community and in his mother's lack of love for him. Geraldine gives her love and affection to her blue-eyed cat, which represents her desire to be closer to whiteness. Junior, in turn, faces his mother's extraordinary coldness and rejection of him.
Additionally, Junior must face the rejection of his presence in the broader black community, which can indeed be felt as an daunting everyday rejection for a boy who longs to connect with his heritage and people.
As the novel progresses, Junior begins to loathe the black children whom he had previously wished to play with, and he begins acting cruelly toward them. This rejection of the children he had wished to connect with signals a monstrous rejection within himself. Junior begins to loathe himself in a way that separates him from his own identity as a black person. He is unable to truly connect with himself, his mother, or his peers.
In The Bluest Eye, rejection is a dominant theme that shapes the development of the novel by defining the lives of the main characters, as well as the broader African American community. First, the novel can be seen as a series of rejections to each individual. This can be seen, for example, through the life of Pecola. Pecola is rejected "routinely," as part of her daily experience. For example, the children and adults she interacts with at school, and at the grocer's, routinely ignore her, fail to see her, and make fun of her. These rejections are so part of the shape and fabric of her life that she has internalized them, to the point that she sees herself as lesser and inferior to a white standard of beauty. Thus, she is obsessed with having blue eyes, an obsession that climaxes at the end of the novel when she suffers a mental breakdown. These rejections are damaging, and so is the "extraordinary" rejection of love and abuse she suffers at the hands of her parents. After Pecola is raped by her father, Morrison implies that even Pecola's baby is rejected—first by the broader community, and then by life itself. This is a "monstrous" rejection. There are many examples of rejections that occur to each individual character in the novel.
However, the novel can also be seen as a reflection on the rejection of blackness from a broader societal perspective. The norms, standards, and successes of the characters' community are all shaped and ultimately limited by society's expectations and allowances for them. Morrison slowly develops a sense of hopelessness through these individual and corporate rejections that shapes and defines the world of these characters and the novel.
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