SOURCE: Byerman, Keith E. “Intense Behaviors: The Use of the Grotesque in The Bluest Eye and Eva's Man.” CLA Journal 25, no. 4 (June 1982): 447-57.

In the following essay, Byerman compares the use of grotesque literary conventions in The Bluest Eye and Gayl Jones's Eva's Man, highlighting its suitability to African American literature as a vehicle for social protest.

At the end of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, the little black girl Pecola, a victim of incest, is pictured talking to herself in a mirror about her imaginary blue eyes. At the end of Eva's Man, by Gayl Jones, Eva is describing, in increasing incomprehensible terms, her poisoning and castrating of the man with whom she lived. Both of these female characters are the central figures of the novels under discussion, and each is, in literary terms, a grotesque. But such figures are not being used by Morrison and Jones...