Breath, Eyes, Memory

Do a character summary of Sophie’s character. What are the obstacles that Sophie must overcome? Using examples and quotes from the text, describe how Sophie fares in this quest. What does she draw from in order to overcome her problems?


From the brilliant mind of Edwidge Danticat comes Sophie Caco, a young Haitian girl whose life is split into a million different pieces, overloaded with countless obstacles, and challenged by the culture and generational practices that surround her. She is the strong and forgiving woman whose life progression is illustrated in the novel Breath, Eyes, Memory. In this story, Sophie is forced to embrace a relationship with the mother that gave her away as well as adapt to a new and vastly different society. She must overcome the traditional practices of ‘testing’ and work to gain control of her own body. This is a character that battles many rigorous and painful hardships.

The reader follows Sophie’s journey at a slight distance. She often expresses her emotions, but never seems to reveal herself completely. Frequently, Sophie depicts herself in the third person and provides little or no explanations. Her story reads very much like a script, lacking in emotional intimacy. This speaks volumes about the type of person Sophie is. Not only does she disguise her true feelings from the reader, she hides them from herself. When her mother ‘tests’ her, she avoids confronting her true emotions by ‘doubling’. She places herself in a different dimension, where all things are beautiful and painless. This removes her from a situation where she feels extremely violated, uncomfortable, and emotionally distraught. She also utilizes this doubling mechanism in other scenarios when she begins to feel a sense of pain. When Sophie first arrives in New York and is dining with her mother and her mother’s significant other, she feels incredibly awkward and lost, not sure where she fits into the equation. “When they looked up from their plates, my mother and Marc eyed each other like there were things they couldn't say because of my presence. I tried to stuff myself and keep quiet, pretending that I couldn't even see them. My mother now had two lives: Marc belonged to her present life, I was a living memory from her past” (56). By pretending that she couldn’t see the two of them, she places herself in an imaginary world devoid of her mother and this new life she has so abruptly been thrown into. Sophie lives her own life at a distance, refusing to cope with any of her emotions. This is why she later visits a therapist in order to confront the feelings she has trained herself never to experience.

In addition to ‘testing’, Sophie is succumbed to many other obstacles. She is forced to find a balance between two cultures: her Haitian upbringing and the present America. She feels pressure from American society to be thin so she becomes bulimic. This is one of the ways she tries to take control of her own body. She later returns to Haiti to become healthy and to rediscover her happiness as well as reactivate her cultural memory. She feels she has lost a sense of herself due to her mother and the American society. She strives to rebuild herself as a whole instead of living her life split into thousands of pieces. Sophie also struggles with the imperfections of her mother who violates her emotionally and physically. “As a child, the mother I imagined for myself was like Erzulie, the lavish Virgin Mother. She was the healer of all women and the desire of all men…Even though she was far away, she was always with me. I could always count on her, like one counts on the sun coming out at dawn” (59). Sophie must overcome her wishes and desires and learn to accept the reality of her mother. A part of her journey is learning to cope with the abuse and working toward forgiveness. In the third part of the novel, the reader sees a major growth when Sophie’s therapist asks if she hates her mother and she replies, “She wants to be good to be now…and I want to accept it” (207).

Even though Sophie’s mother and her cultural differences are large road blocks, perhaps the most prominent struggle of all is her search for womanhood. In the very last pages of the novel, Sophie’s grandmother tells her a girl can only become a woman when her mother passes before her. Therefore, the burial of Sophie’s mother opens the door to her womanhood. She accepts the reality of all that has been and is now able to move forward. “There is always a place where, if you listen closely in the night, you will hear your mother telling a story and at the end of the tale, she will ask you this question: ‘Ou libere?’ Are you free, my daughter?’ My grandmother quickly pressed her finger over my lips. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘you will know how to answer” (234). Sophie forgives her mother, embraces her culture, and becomes a woman: she has overcome it all.


WORK CITED.

Danticat, Edwidge. Breath, Eyes, Memory. New York: Vintage Books, 1998. Print.