『가장 푸른 눈』에 나타난 삶을 향한 죽음의 변주 읽기

Variations on Death for Life in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

This thesis examines the theme of death deeply embedded as a leitmotif in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Death, which serves as a backdrop of her literary imagination, is inexplicably linked to the lives of African Americans who have been afflicted with slavery, segregation, and discrimination. While death is foregrounded as such, Morrison's vision works through death in order to confront the question of how and why we learn to live our lives intensely and well. Such a quest for life by taking a detour of death is performed by the writer in a musical form of variation. In other words, her fiction utilizes the form of variation to illustrate the process from death to life. In The Bluest Eye, the variation is played into diverse deaths, which can be divided into three categories. The first is the death of natural things which include the deaths of a marigold, a cat, and a dog that pair each death of characters. The second is the death of Pecolla's baby that implies a new generation and Cholly's death that stands for an old generation. The last is Pecolla's symbolic death. To read Morrison’s The Bluest Eye through the lens of variation of death provides a new critical perspective that merits a discussion. In other words, it enables one to have a more profound insight into her novel.