Celie's Progression and the Epistolary Format in The Color Purple

The format of The Color Purple, written entirely in letters, seems here to serve a more directly personal narration by the speaker, Celie. For most of the novel the letters are consisted of Celie’s letters to God. Through the letters sent, the reader is able to immediately and boldly recognize the kind of life Celie has. These “written” passages pretty much equate to a diary, already then giving off a confessional, private tone of sorts. But what also makes these letters is Celie’s voice. With this epistolary format, the reader can see that the tragic occurrences in Celie’s childhood have an added weight being that her approach to these situations is so downplayed, frightened yet nonchalant almost, convinced of the happenstance of her life. And though you don’t get the primary perspectives of the other characters like Albert and Shug, Celie’s character is somewhat synonymous to a blank slate, in that the way she describes their actions and associates them directly to their personalities causes a clearer interpretation of the other characters moreso than most first-person narrators.
Also, the novel’s format presents an immediate display of Celie’s growth as a character, given that the progression is addressed by herself. In the beginning letters of the book, the passages are short, blunt, to-the-point as she describes her horrid living experiences: “He act like he can’t stand me no more. Say I’m evil an always up to no good. He took my other little baby, a boy this time. But I don’t think he kilt it. I think he sold it to a man an his wife over Monticello.” As the pages go on, the letters get longer and longer, and we also see more insight into her sister Nettie; with her as with Shug, the reader easily gets a sense of how they are, and because one knows that Celie cares very deeply for these characters, one can better see the motives behind their actions in the way she writes about them. Because Celie’s maturity rested on her own shoulders, there’s less of a front and defensiveness and bias that comes with more and more contemporary first-person narratives (in fact, her moral basis is a most general and basically instinctive sense of right and wrong, given that no one else was there to guide her, furthering her, as I would claim, near-objective presence in the novel). And when Celie changes the recipient of her letters to Nettie, the questionably empty void of her personality begins to shift, the reader knows even more into Celie’s mind, and more and more she becomes less a mere product of her environment. For instance, towards the end when Shug leaves Celie and Albert for a nineteen year-old, of all people, it’s those latter two that end up consoling each other over their loss. Celie says, “Here us is, I thought, two old fools left over from love, keeping each other company under the stars.” And by the end of the novel when Nettie and the rest of Celie’s family arrive from Africa, one can see the happy ending, but this is almost tragic in itself, one can see Celie’s transformation (“Matter of fact, I think this the youngest us ever felt.”), from a tortured childhood to Celie receiving what each person deserves in the least.