The Sounds of Colours: A Pragmatic Study of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Little is known about the pragmatic and cultural meanings of colours that authors use to deliver specific ideas and messages. It is still undetermined whether colours can express the speaker’s intended meaning.  One of the areas that should be visited is the literary works with a long history of familiarity with colours. The present study scrutinizes the most frequently used colours in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970); it investigates their pragmatic and cultural meanings. It aims to determine the primary concept revealed through colours and identify the most flouted maxim in the novel. The main question that the study tries to answer is what are the most frequent colours and their cultural sounds in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that determine the main concept by pinpointing the most flouted maxim. It is hypothesized that blue, white and black are the most common colours in the investigated contexts. Racial discrimination is the central concept shown through flouting quality maxim. Randomly selected extracts are analysed according to a model based on Grice’s (1975) Maxims Breaching. In the present study, data has been approached qualitatively. The study has come up with certain conclusions to prove the above hypotheses such as it is found that blue, white and black are the most used colours.