Marveling at how this was Morrison's first novel when most writers could not approach this level of writing at their heights. . . .

Her plots are less about the events (though these are stunning, dramatic, tragic, forlorn, funny, wrenching) than the attitudes and thinking which intersect beneath them. In The Bluest Eye, we know or sense most of the narrative early, but the engagement comes from following the naive and comic readings of the world from the children to the naive and broken readings from the adults. Some of Morrison's most powerful moments are buried in a minor appositve or sidebar presumption buried in a thick paragraph of exposition which somehow resonate across years and geographies to land as motifs in another setting altogether. She writes less in narratives than in currents.

So we must not seek narrative resolutions in her works--life rarely offers them, and then only temporarily. The resolutions are in the knitting together of our fragmented ideas of justice and love, of meaning and self.