Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Breath, Eyes, Memory, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Mothers, Daughters, and Generational Trauma
Virginity and Violence
Home
Memory, Storytelling, and the Past
Summary
Analysis
When Joseph gets back from his tour, Sophie goes out to hear him play the first night he returns. After the show, Joseph takes Sophie out on the town, and they stay out until dawn—Sophie isn’t worried, though, because of how late her mother comes home. Joseph brings Sophie to her front door, and she lets him kiss her for the first time.
Sophie and Joseph’s relationship continues to change and grow, even as Sophie becomes increasingly aware of just how opposed Martine is to the idea of Sophie having a boyfriend.
Themes
Joseph goes out on another short tour, and when he comes back, he asks Sophie to marry him in earnest. She is unable to give him an answer, knowing her mother would never allow such a thing. The next day, though, when Sophie and Martine go on another train ride, Sophie tells her that “Henry Napoleon” is never coming back. Martine darkly tells Sophie that there are certain secrets she can’t keep—“not from [her] mother anyway.”
As it becomes clear that Martine is no longer buying any part of Sophie’s story about “Henry Napoleon,” Sophie notices Martine seeming to want to threaten Sophie and control her every move. This suggests that Martine will soon try to exert authority over Sophie’s body and sexuality in the same way that her own mother did to Martine and Tante Atie.
Themes
The next night, when Sophie comes home late from a night out with Joseph, she walks in to see her mother sitting up in the living room, waiting for her with a belt in her hand. Martine demands to know where Sophie has been, and when Sophie will not answer her, she drags Sophie upstairs, makes her lie down on the bed, and “tests” Sophie’s vagina with her fingers. Sophie tries to distract herself from the horrible act by praying and looking back on happy memories. During the test, Martine tries to distract Sophie in her own way: by telling her a story about the Marasas, figures of Haitian legend who were lovers and mirror images of one another. Martine condemns the vain Marasas, and warns Sophie that if she runs off with a man, she will be “giving up a lifetime” with her mother.
Sophie’s secret is at last found out—and Martine makes good on her threats to ascertain all of Sophie’s “secrets” by testing her. Sophie is intensely traumatized by the experience of being “tested”—and by Martine’s unhinged monologue about the evil of finding one’s “mirror image” in a lover, even as she wishes aloud that Sophie would stay with her forever and essentially be her “mirror image.” Martine is enacting upon Sophie the very violence her own mother enacted upon her, perpetuating the generational trauma that has permeated the Caco family for untold years.
Themes
Martine leaves Sophie alone in the bedroom after the test. Sophie hears her mother’s words echoing in her head—“There are secrets you cannot keep”—as she thinks about how much she feels like her mother’s doll. Sophie realizes that she hasn’t seen the doll in a long time, and figures that her mother has thrown the doll away “because she no longer [has] any use for it.”
Sophie realizes that, like her mother’s doll, she is becoming a useless burden to her mother. She begins to fear what will happen to her when her mother no longer has a need for her, either, equating her own worth with what practical use she can provide for others. Sophie’s unhealthy outlook on relationships in this passage foreshadows future struggles with her self-image and relationships.
Themes
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