Life of Worth as Seen

¶ … Life of Worth as Seen in the Bluest Eye and American Beauty

Toni Morrison maintains that a life of worth is something for which we must work, noting that a life of worth is filled with intricate, interesting work. She suggests that a life of worth is up to the individual and every choice along the way takes one in a positive or negative direction. Two characters that illustrate opposite extremes of this gamut are Claudia MacTeer from Toni Morrison's novel, the Bluest Eye, and Lester Burnham in the film, American Beauty. Both characters experience challenges and both face crossroads but they handle them differently and we discover that how challenges are handled makes more difference than the challenges themselves. Claudia faces the challenge of recognizing her part in destroying another human being's life. This is difficult and, while most might find it too incredible to overcome, Claudia recognizes that the best thing she can do for herself and Pecola is to be better from that point on. Lester, on the other hand, is simply dissatisfied with life and when he slips into apathy, he becomes his own victim. Instead of choosing to make things better, he chooses to live a dream.

In "The Bluest Eye," the Claudia comes away with a sense of worth. While the novel centers around Pecola, we see that the narrator needed to experience that in order to become a better person for it. In other words, she had to witness the suffering of another individual to gain a deeper appreciation of life. The best she can hope for is the knowledge that she will be a different person because of what happened. Pecola's life is not wasted because Claudia learns something from it and vows to never let that happened again. She states:

All of our waste which we dumped on her and which she absorbed... We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness... we were not strong, only aggressive; we were not free, merely licensed; we were not compassionate, we were polite; not good, but well behaved. (205)

Here we see the culmination of all that occurred and while Claudia could not change things in the past, she could change herself. She does change and this decision allows her to live a worthy life because she is proactive and wants to change. Even at the beginning of the novel, Claudia prepares us for the impending guilt. She writes:

It was a long time before my sister and I admitted to ourselves that no green was going to spring from our seeds. Once we knew, our guilt was relieved only by fights and mutual accusations about who was to blame... What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love, and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth. (7-8)

Claudia's life becomes worthy because she makes a choice to make it so.

On the other hand, Lester Burnham represents a life that did have worth. Early in the film, he admits that he might as well be dead. While Lester seeks happiness, he is going about achieving it the wrong way. One of Lester's primary problems is the fact that he seeks respect from others and his happiness, or worth, is based on this aspect of his life. Because he does not receive the respect he thinks he deserves, he uses this as a reason to be unhappy and feel as though his life is worthless. While it is true that Lester's life is not worthless per se, it is important to realize that because he thinks it is and behaves as though it is, he has already given up in the sense that Morrison suggested. Lester has resigned himself to the fact that his life has reached its peak. In other words, he has placed himself into spiritual and mental sleep. At one point, he admits to Brad that he has "nothing left to lose." Here we see that Lester has all but given up because he believes that there is nothing of value left in life.

In addition, Lester's life is worthless because he is not proactive. He proves Morrison's point succinctly when he lives so apathetically and selfishly. Instead of working on things with his wife, he allows himself to become distracted with a silly fantasy about Angela. He lives in a dream and has no regard for the real life that belongs to him. While Lester could have made motions in the direction of something intricate and interesting, he chose to be oblivious instead. Lester was tired and he did not want to work hard for much. He justifies Morrison when she suggests that a worthy life is one that comes with effort. He has given up on this notion and decided that his fantasy life was better than anything he could ever actually experience. He is living out what Morrison says when she declares that we can make our lives trifling if we choose and no one can change that for us - except ourselves.