The Bluest Eye : text analysis of the two prologues

The Bluest Eye is a novel written in 1970 by Toni Morrison. The narrator, Claudia, tells the story of herself and Pecola Breedlove, a young girl who came to live with them when her family fell apart. The novel’s first striking particularity is its beginning – the story starts with two mysterious prologues. The first one resembles a children’s primer, while the second one is an introduction to some of the key elements of the plot – the main characters, some indication about the historical context…
In both of these prologues, how does style relate to the themes of the novel, such as beauty norms, racial self-loathing, secrets?

The most noticeable element of the first prologue is its structure. The fragmentation of the paragraph into short sentences – “Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door.” – makes it look like a children’s primer. The family described in the prologue is said to be “very happy” and seems like a typical middle-class family. However, what catches the eye of the reader is the loneliness which Jane seems to be enduring; her family appears to ignore her and she doesn’t know why. The choice of point of view is deliberate; the reader sees the world through Jane’s eyes, through a child’s eyes – eyes that do not understand everything and to whom things aren’t explained; “adults do not talk to [them] – they give [them] directions”. This idea of childhood innocence, ignorance and weakness is conveyed by the sentence fragmentation in the first part of the first prologue. The children can hear and see but can’t make sense out of the world that surrounds them, leading to events just happening without them knowing why. The lack of punctuation creates a sense of speed in the two other parts of the first prologue and denotes the idea of unstoppable events flowing onto the lives of these children who are unaware of the reason why terrible things are happening to them. This is also