However, Toni Morrison uses “blues aesthetics” not only to develop the thematic level of the story, to recreate the memory of the past African American generations, but also to build the structural pattern of the novel. That is to say, Claudia is the voice for Pecola’s blues and the community’s blues as well. Being the “Eye” of the title not only Pecola’s longing for blue eyes, but also a reference to the eye that Claudia takes at Pecola. Both the song and the novel exhibits a physical progression from an initial statement of loss to a concluding statement of resolution. Louis Blues’ in The Bluest Eye, the song Claudia’s mother used to sing during her childhood, Morrison has chosen a blues that registers all of the central concerns of the story. What is more, Morrison has stated that her narrative “effort is to be like something that has probably only been fully expressed perhaps in music.” (Interview 408) and The Bluest Eye is the genesis of her effort “to do what the music did for blacks, what we used to be able to do with each other in private and in that civilization that existed underneath the white civilization” (Morrison, “Language” 371). As Trudier Harris has pointed out, Morrison’s use of suppressed popular communicative forms – visual, oral, musical, and more – is an integral part of her uncovering “discredited” knowledge (Morrison’s deployment of the folk traditional-bearers and the transmission of popular memory, by Trudier Harris).
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