"Splits." This essay discusses the Breedlove family from the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

 The Breedlove family knows pain. They know their ugliness, too, and therefore they know loneliness, hardship, and misery. Their poverty envelops them in shame, forcing them to accept their defect. The Breedloves find the confinement of their poverty distressing, frustrating, and oftentimes infuriating. Thus, each Breedlove senses that he or she may never experience happiness. In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison depicts the piteous state of the Breedlove's rented storefront apartment; specifically, she …

…Breedloves inflict pain upon themselves and each other. Morrison stresses the inevitability of their misfortunes, since they "started off split, no good," and how their inability to enjoy life distances them form reality (36). The racism which they accept as truth "limits the delight of things not related to it,"confining them to lives of pain, sorrow, and ugliness which ultimately produces the demise of each Breedlove- to denial, to escape, to insanity, and to death (37).