The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Published 1970 · 226 pages · 51,465 words · about 4 hours at an average pace · Literary Fiction
How hard is The Bluest Eye to read?
The Bluest Eye scores 59 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.
- Vocabulary: 52 out of 100
- African-American vernacular.
- Sentence structure: 58 out of 100
- Morrison's varied style.
- Abstraction: 62 out of 100
- Beauty, race, damage.
- Information density: 55 out of 100
- Ohio, 1940s.
- Narrative indirection: 62 out of 100
- Multiple voices, seasons.
- Symbolic density: 68 out of 100
- Blue eyes, marigolds.
- Ironic distance: 55 out of 100
- Tragic awareness.
- Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
- Outcome known.
- Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
- Seasonal structure.
How The Bluest Eye is regarded
The Bluest Eye holds a literary regard score of 86 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.