of all the zest and reasonableness of life.” (Morrison 41/42) What Morrison in effect is saying, is that Mrs. Breedlove wanted, depended on, and needed to fight Cholly on a daily basis just to survive. The point of all this history on Cholly is to give one example of Morrison using a negative character to produce large amounts of character development in the story, sometimes good, and sometimes bad. Cholly affected characters in different ways, take his kids for example, “Sammy cursed for a while, or left the house, or threw himself into the fray. He was known, by the time he was fourteen, to have run away from home no less than twenty-seven times” (Morrison 43). Pecola dealt with the pain her father brought in a different way. “She struggled between an overwhelming desire that one would kill the other, and a profound wish that she herself could die” (Morrison 43). Of course we know the end result of Cholly’s influences on his kids. Sammy takes off, this time probably for good, and Pecola goes insane. The rest of the male characters in the story do not play as significant a role as Cholly Breedlove did, however Morrison still uses them to instigate character development. For example, Claudia and Frieda’s dad, Mr. Macteer, is mentioned rarely, but from what is said about him, we can decipher that he is an honest, hardworking, loving father who tries hard to make ends meet and to make his family unit work. He is the one male character in this book that goes against the grain. I think that Morrison thought that one positive male character in the story wouldn’t be so bad, after all the ratio of negative male characters to positive ones in the novel is about one hundred to one. He, unlike his other male counterparts, is very protective of his family, which is illustrated when he beats up Mr. Henry and shoots at him with a gun after he fondles Frieda. He truly was the only male character with a...
