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
As Sophie pulls into the driveway of her and Joseph’s home in Providence, he runs out of the house to meet them. He lifts Brigitte from the car and carries her inside, leaving Sophie with the luggage. Inside, Joseph tells Sophie that he is happy to see her, but that he wants to kill her at the same time. He admits that he missed her, and asks about the trip. Sophie explains that she was, among other things, helping Granmè Ifé make preemptive funeral arrangements, explaining such an obsession with arranging death is “a thing at home.” Joseph is surprised to hear Sophie refer to Haiti as “home”—usually, home is what she calls Martine’s house, the one place to which she could never return.
In referring to Haiti as “home,” Sophie shocks and confuses Joseph, who points out that Sophie always saw her true home as the one place to which she was forbidden to return. This passage contains the crux of Danticat’s argument about the nature of home as a place one can never return to once they’ve left—a state of innocence that one can never get back to no matter how hard one tries.
Themes
Sophie sprawls out on the couch, and Joseph sits beside her and kisses her ear. He tells her he’s determined to get through their problems together. He asks Sophie if she left impulsively or had been planning to go—Sophie doesn’t answer, and instead says the two of them “weren’t connecting physically.” Joseph asks Sophie if she found an aphrodisiac in Haiti. Sophie replies that she needs understanding, not an aphrodisiac. Joseph tells Sophie that though she’s usually “reluctant to start” making love, she “seem[s] to enjoy it” after a certain point.
Even though Joseph clearly loves Sophie, it’s also evident that he doesn’t understand her. It seems that the patience he professed to have early on in their relationship has long since waned, and he has failed to intuit Sophie’s trauma surrounding sex.
Themes
That night, Sophie and Joseph get into bed, but Sophie cannot sleep. She calls her mother, but Martine hurries off the phone, explaining that Marc is at the apartment. After hanging up the phone, Sophie tells Joseph that her mother is pregnant. Joseph seems to think the news is great, and tells Sophie she’ll finally have a “kindred spirit” in her new sibling.
Even though Sophie understands the threat and danger implicit in her mother’s announcement, Joseph is blind to all the trauma, pain, and suffering the pregnancy stands to resurface in both Martine and Sophie’s lives.
Themes
The next day, Sophie takes Brigitte for a checkup at the pediatrician. The pediatrician asks if Brigitte was exposed to any areas with malaria, but Sophie insists she was very careful and boiled all of Brigitte’s bathing and drinking water. The pediatrician warns Sophie against bringing Brigitte—strong as she may be—back to Haiti.
Sophie has bought into the rhetoric that the women of her family are strong enough to withstand anything—but her American doctor reminds her of what a myth that is. Sophie is in danger of treating her daughter like she’s stronger than she is—and unwittingly, perhaps, passing down a bit of the trauma she herself inherited from her family’s older generations.
Themes
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That night, Sophie eats the dinner Joseph has cooked for her and does not purge. She calls her mother to ask how Marc is, and how the baby is. Martine begs Sophie not to call the fetus a baby, as she hasn’t decided what to do about it. Martine confides in Sophie that she sees her violeur, or rapist, everywhere. As Sophie talks to her mother, Joseph moves his hands under her nightgown and onto her breasts. Martine admits that she went to an abortion clinic, but the meeting with the doctor only made her night terrors intensify. Sophie promises to come visit over the weekend.
Martine confiding in Sophie about the deep sexual traumas her pregnancy is bringing up for her is contrasted against Joseph’s instigation of sexual activity with the uninterested Sophie. This to underscores just how misunderstood and discounted women’s trauma can be, even (or especially) by those closest to them.
Themes
As soon as Sophie hangs up, Joseph pulls her to him and begins kissing her. Sophie begins “doubling.” She lets Joseph peel off her clothes, but lets her mind wander elsewhere. She imagines lying in bed with her mother, helping her fight off her nightmares. Sophie feels an odd gratitude that she and Martine can at last be friends—she is starting to believe that they are twins, like the Marasas.
Though Martine once suggested that Sophie only wanted a man to be her Marasas, Sophie now believes that perhaps her mother was truly her twin or soulmate all along. Thus, it seems that Sophie has come to empathize with her mother despite the abuse she wrought on Sophie, and can see that they are not so different, after all.
Themes
After Joseph finishes, he rolls off of Sophie and tells her she was “very good.” She tells him that she kept her eyes closed the whole time to stop her tears falling. After Joseph falls asleep, Sophie goes to the kitchen, eats all of the leftovers from dinner, and then goes to the bathroom to purge the food.
Sophie is unable to connect sexually with her husband—she feels only pain and trauma during their sexual encounters. Joseph, however, pushes this fact aside and convinces himself that Sophie is getting better, ignoring the worsening of her eating disorder and other anxieties.
Themes
