She reveals that at the time she and her sister Frieda thought the marigolds did not bloom because Pecola was having her father's baby.

Claudia tells us that 'quiet as it's kept,' in the fall of 1941, when she was a young girl, no marigolds bloomed. The second section is a short passage narrated by Claudia MacTeer. The third time the text has no capitalization, no punctuation, and no spaces between the words. The second time the same story appears without any punctuation or capitalization, but with a space between each of the words. The first time the text appears with full punctuation and normal spacing.

The same story appears three times in succession, repeated verbatim each time. There is a pretty house, Mother, Father, Dick, Jane, a cat, a dog, and, at the end, a friend for Jane to play with. The first section is a version of the classic Dick and Jane stories found in grade school reading primers. Pecola's tragedy will stem in large part from her unquestionably accepting the image and the values of the white culture far more than anything else in the primer, she wants to have Jane's blue eyes, fraudulent symbols of real beauty that have no real relationship to lasting happiness and love.The Bluest Eye opens with two short untitled and unnumbered sections. Throughout the novel, excerpts of this primer will be repeated as reminders for readers to be aware of the dichotomy between the black and white cultures. Jane's father and mother laugh and play in Pecola's world, no one laughs or plays, and there are no happy fathers and mothers. Jane has a pretty red dress Pecola does not. In her neighborhood, families are not happy.

In her neighborhood, there are no green and white houses with white doors. The perfect world of the happy white family in the first-grade primer is unlike any world Pecola Breedlove knows. The primer's once-perfect sentences are fractured and disjointed, rushing into a flood of words - incomprehensible linguistic chaos. When the paragraph is repeated a third time, the spacing between the sentences fades, flowing into one long, almost incoherent sentence. The paragraph is repeated, and this time all punctuation disappears, along with the capital letters. In short, simple sentences, the family in the primer is described as a happy, picture-perfect, American white family, consisting of a big, strong Father, a nice, laughing Mother, a clean-cut son, Dick, and a pretty daughter, Jane.

This first fragment seems to be an excerpt from a 1940s American first-grade primer, one that was used for decades to teach white and black students to read.

The bluest eye sparknotes