To what extent is Cholly to blame for his violence against his family? Which other people or circumstances may also be to blame? What's the novel's position on blame?

Toni morrison, in the foreword for _The Bluest Eye_ makes clear what she was not attempting to do in the novel,
"I did not want to dehumanize the characters who trashed Pecola and contributed to hercollapse."(Xll, Foreword)She wants to highlight the extent of the damage without veiling the contextual background of the characters that were participating in this damage.
Cholly Breedlove is a key participant in this damage, which although extreme both in extent and impact on Pecola is however not limited to her. Cholly Breedlove is constantly fighting with Pauline his wife in front of both their kids. Their first child, Sammy's response to this is constantly trying to escape home yet also inevitably always coming back. Showing how this character and others are trapped in the very same system that is mercilessly destroying them.
Pauline, who can not exactly be classified as a recipient of the violence but rather a participant, seems to rely on making sure her sorroundings are as ugly as she believes herself to be.
"To depriveher of these fights was to deprive her of all the zest and reasonableness of life. Cholly, by his habitual drunkenness and orneriness, provided them both with the material theyneeded to make their lives tolerable"( _The Bluest Eye,_ 41)The psychological pressure from the environment and details of their upbringing make them reach for violence, paradoxically, as a means to survival.
Cholly is a man living with rage, stemming from a very early 'emasculation'. He feels helpless as a supposed protector who in actual fact cannot protect because his upbringing and his race do not provide him with the instruments with which to do so.
"Hepoured out on her the sum of all his inarticulate fury andaborted desires. Hating her, he could leave himself intact."( _The Bluest Eye_ , 42)During his first sexual encounter as a teenager, two white men come and violently flash a torch on him and force his to continue the act under their watch. This scene in particular, captures the idea that the novel had already highlighted with a lesser intensity before. The idea of a concentrated, menacing and violent white "gaze" that in turn shrinked the one on the receiving end of the gaze. The narrator describes an almost similar effect in another instance when Pecola goes to buy Mary Janes from Mr Yakobowski
"Somewherebetween retina and object, between vision and view, his eyesdraw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in timeand space he senses that he need not waste the effort of aglance"(48)
Again, the white gaze has the effect of reducing its object, until the receiver begins to see themselves only through that very gaze that destroys them, hence self destructing. Cholly Breedlove can very well be said to be in that intensified motion of self destruction and reproducing the violence that created him.
In 1989, Gail forwarded a paradigm he called the "victim- victimizer paradigm" where, “both offenders and victims have ‘issues of power and control’ that for the victim may be ‘the outcome of abuse’” (cited in Rasmussen, 2012: 270). He posits that one of the possible outcomes of abuse on a victim could be to assume the power of the abuser which leads to the victim terrorizing and hurting people.
In _The Bluest Eye,_ it is very critical to view all actions in relation to various other actions culminating to that act. Pecola's rape by Cholly acts as a seal to her shattering that had otherwise started from birth, where her mother likened her to a ball of hair and her life becomes a series of rejections thereon. Cholly Breedlove's act of raping Pecola is, too the arrival to a disastrous point from a long journey of hurt, starting from birth, when his mother wrapped him in two blankets and one newspaper and dumped him by the rail road. When his father ran from him before he was born, the intrusion on a sexual encounter, his association of it with impotence, helplessness and failure to protect. His failure at reconnecting with his father that caused him to defacate on himself. This is the context and background precluding the rape Cholly commits. While all of this does not absolve him of guilt, they however distribute it. There are factors that made Cholly Breedlove and those, it seems, are what Toni Morrison wants to investigate. She seems to be against the comfort that comes with apportioning blame which is why she refrains from creating Cholly as a totally repulsive character.
Claudia in the last paragraph of the book, quits apportioning blame and admits " how it was the fault of the earth, theland, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entirecountry was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad forcertain kinds of flowers"(206)
If however one must place blame somewhere, then it would have to be distributed among Cholly's absent father, from whom he would have learnt how to be a father and a husband. His absent mother, from whom he would have learnt how to love a woman right and to be loved so that he could in turn love. The furthering of his sexual complex during his stay with his aunt before her eventual death, the bright intruding torch of the two white men, its disabling effect but, above all the ever present invisible gaze that bred both his double conciousness and destructive tendencies.

To what extent is Cholly to blame for his violence against his family? Which other people or circumstances may also be to blame? What's the novel's position on blame? Cholly is a complex character, with a difficult life that one could attribute to the character of America’s racist history. An abandoned child who grew up without role models to teach him how to love or parent children, Cholly was thrown into the position of “father” without knowing how to fulfill this role. His abuse of alcohol becomes one of the means by which he tries to cope with fatherhood, married life, and the pressures of being the sole provider, which leads to bouts of violence and the neglect of his family. After Cholly rapes Pecola, his daughter, near the end of the novel, he slips out of view and dies alone at a workhouse.
While it would be remiss not to blame Cholly for his actions, it is clear he has issues with women and his sexuality in general. His story of losing his virginity was tainted by the humiliation he experienced by the hands of two white men. One could read the rape of Pecola as a way of asserting himself, of taking back the sense of power he had been denied in his own sexual experience. The novel’s position on blame is generally sympathetic, including the voice of the third-person narrator. Claudia even insists that Cholly truly loved Pecola, even though he raped her. The narrator does not want to let Cholly off the hook for his crime, and doesn’t leave out the horrific details, though as readers we are poised to question Cholly’s criminality in that he, too, was a victim of trauma. If we read the rape of Pecola in this light, then we are presented with two damaged characters engaged in an act of sexual violence, an act that, while shocking, is part of the continuum of ongoing psychological (and physical) violence that happens to black bodies as a result of poverty and systemic oppression.
This novel’s narratives of violence are meant to expand the reader’s empathetic sense by approaching trauma as part of a collective consciousness. Nobody is immune from violence in this novel—and the fact that violence will go so far as to break down even the trust between father and daughter can be read in light of the institution of slavery that, among many traumatic effects, broke down the structure of the African American family. As such, there is no one person to blame, but a whole history to blame. Pauline and Cholly create a house of violence and apathy that detrimentally affects their children because misery is all they’ve known. In this way, blame is diffused through the novel; all the characters, including Cholly (and Pecola) are in various states of trauma—both inherited and inflicted—that they cannot ultimately work through.

Cholly is to blame for his violence against his family because Cholly had choices. He did not need to choose to be violent against his family. However, with the ravages of slavery, it can be seen as understandable why Cholly chose to lash out against his family. It's the same syndrome of the father hits the child, then the child hits the dog. Cholly was under a lot of pressure because of slavery and the sign of the times of slavery that was present in the book the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. Cholly felt beaten down by the society that he was in, therefore, this could be one of the main reasons why he was beating down his family as well. This also answers which other people or circumstances may also be to blame in concerns with this particular Toni Morrison book. The novel's position on blame which is ever present in all of Toni Morrison's books, is that African Americans need to take responsibility for their actions and understand that although there were things such as slavery, as well as systemic racism in America, that is also still present today, that they must also see themselves as human and understand that there are better choices, as well as better ways to react to things and they must understand and they must know their power, even when it may appear that they are powerless.

Cholly Breedlove is responsible to the extent that any mentally competent adult is responsible for their actions. In the moment that he rapes his daughter, Pecola, he has drunkenly returned home and sees her washing dishes at the sink. She suddenly scratches the back of her calf with her foot in the way that her mother, Pauline, once did. Her mundane action makes Cholly wistful for his youth and for the time when he and Pauline were in love. His horrific act, which robs his daughter of her innocence—and drives her insane—is an attempt to recapture his own innocence and to feel love again. Toni Morrison was making a statement by naming the family "the Breedloves"—a statement that is both ironic, because they are not ostensibly loving toward one another, and telling, for what they all need and want most is love.
Internalized racism and poverty are largely to blame for the cycle of violence in the Breedlove family. They dislike themselves not just for being black but for having such dark skin, which subjects them to contempt from everyone and leads them to believe that they are ugly. It is significant that Toni Morrison published The Bluest Eye in 1970, at the height of the "Black is beautiful" movement, and that she set her novel in 1941, on the eve of the Second World War, when the United States would condemn Germany for its dehumanization of minorities in Europe without accounting for its own dehumanization of black people at home.
Morrison does not directly condemn Cholly for his assault of his daughter. There is no need; his act is clearly wrong. Instead, she provides Cholly with his own narrative to help the reader understand how he became someone who would perform such a horrific act. Morrison also provides a context in which we can try to understand how Pauline could become so indifferent to her own daughter: it starts with a lack of love for herself.
Since no particular person can be blamed for Pecola's self-hatred, her father's assault on her, or her subsequent descent into madness, there is nothing left to do but to "give her" the blue eyes that she thinks will make people acknowledge her and love her. What is to blame is the societal racism that has convinced Pecola that she needs blue eyes and which has taught all of the black people around her to despise her for being so black and a reflection of their own self-hate.