In the book, this quote means that the children grow up thinking that they can’t change the ways they were raised. That all they grew up knowing; everthing they saw as “normal” or as”the way things were”, was never going to change. As these children become women and men, they aren’t able to see past the small box they grew up in. Which in case continues the cycle where nothing is different because they keep “Believing the shape of the life they must live is as small and mean and broken as they are told” (pg.51).
Professor Laura Westengard
Email: lwestengard@citytech.cuny.edu
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This reminds me a lot of the metanarratives we were talking about today in the context of The Bluest Eye. It would be interesting to compare the stories children are told in Allison’s text and the stories children are told in Morrison’s novel.