The Bluest Eye – Dick and Jane

TheopeningofthisbookisfascinatinginmanywaysforexampleDickandJanearenottheprincipalcharactersofthenovelthesentencesthemselvesareverybasicandtheprogressionofthewritingtoaconvolutedandconfusingformcompletelylackingspacesandpunctuationsuchastheoneyouarereadingrightnowisdisorientingandfundamentallyunlikeanythingyouhavereadbeforewhatcouldMorrisonhavemeantbythiswhatwasherpurposeinconstructingthisjumbledblockofcharacters

As you just saw, punctuation and spacing are as essential to legible writing as oxygen is to breathing. You can read without these elements and you can breathe without oxygen, but not for very long before you pass out. Toni Morrison is not the type to insert such a hazard into her writing without good reason. Therefore we are left to try and make sense not only of what these constricted words are, but what they mean.

Dick, Jane, and their family are used as the tool through which the most basic and common parts of the English language have been taught to children of all races the country over. It stands to reason then that that a child, especially a child of color, would take the fundamental nature of the language taught by Dick and Jane and assume that their whiteness is to be seen as just as normal, just as basic to being an American as speaking English. But the devolution of the Dick and Jane excerpts found throughout the book into the spaceless, punctuation lacking, and increasingly eerie and unsettling passages is anything but natural. They read more like a horror story in many cases than they do an educational text. 

Morrison's manipulation of not only the words of Dick and Jane but the structure of language itself is reflective of how the ideas forced on the African American youth warped their worldviews and their sense of self. This perversion is Morrison's way of highlighting the difference between what is natural and what some might say to be natural, as well as the danger that comes with drawing such a false equivalence. On the surface Dick and Jane is harmless, even helpful as a first step in learning to read or speak. But, to all the black children who read Dick and Jane and came away with a perverted sense of familial normalcy, the notions of what an American family ought to look and act like are as dangerous as any horror movie monster.