Corporeality and Racial Dehumanization: Body Narratives in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

This paper applies Daniel Punday’s theory of corporeal narratology to the interpretation of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye in order to explore how corporeality functions within narrative discourse as a component of the story. Drawing on two core narratological categories, characterization and thematic construction, the paper distinguishes between sorted bodies and general bodies to examine how embodiment operates in the text, and further integrates Punday’s concept of differential embodiment with the notion of racist dehumanization, arguing that the novel depicts a structural interplay between the process of disembodiment and narrative representation. Through the tragic representational disembodiment of Pecola’s mental disorder at the end of the novel, Morrison not only criticizes racist dehumanization but also demonstrates how the denial of embodied subjectivity serves as a narrative expression of systemic oppression. The paper contends that Morrison’s emphasis on corporeality constitutes both an anti-racist narrative strategy and a psychological resistance to the ideological violence of dehumanization.