In her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison deals with children and that element of belief by many black people, as she sees it, that an ultimate glory is possible. Pecola Breedlove yearns for blue eyes as the next best thing to being white. Blue eyes become for her a symbol of pride and dignity. She seeks the glory of blue eyes through prayer … and eventually through madness when, believing that blue eyes have finally been granted her, she walks about flapping her arms like wings, convinced that she can fly. Secure in her madness, she has no knowledge that she has become the town pariah.

The author's second novel, Sula (1974), expands the theme of pariah by charting her heroine's odyssey from childhood to adulthood…. Toni Morrison develops the theme by focusing on two women and their friendship: an extraordinary friendship in which one is a rebel...