fantasy world in which she is no longer ugly or debased. In her own imaginary world, she

endows herself with what she thinks is the most desirable and admirable image so that

she can repair her broken self-narrative and violated self-image. In other words, she spins

her own narrative of self to make sense of the incomprehensible traumatic victimization.

Thus, she turns the townspeople's despising gaze and looks of horror into envious looks

of jealousy at her bluest eye. Her fantasy also enables her to maintain some connection

with her another abusive selfobject, her mother, by interpreting her mother's cruel and

emotionally distant demeanor toward her simply as a sad, but reasonable reaction to

Cholly's departure and loss of love. In creating a fantasy world and distorting the reality

she cannot possibly accept and assimilate into her life, she resumes her life narrative in

her own way and manages to maintain some measure of continuity in her life, although it

completely isolates her from others and from reality and ultimately leads to her social and

psychological demise.

 The final image of Pecola reinforces the devastating cumulative effects of multiple

victimization she has endured and reveals the futility of her attempt at survival by a

serious distortion of reality: "Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a

bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly. Beating the air, a winged but grounded

bird, intent on the blue void it could not reach ... but which filled the valleys of the

mind" (204). Morrison again presents the stranded bird imagery often associated with

Pecola and repeated throughout the novel to symbolically point to her entrapment in her

trauma. Also, the "blue void" insinuates the empty, ungrounded nature of her desperate

wish to have the bluest eye to compensate for the persecutions and rejections she silently

has to endure.