Breath, Eyes, Memory Literary Elements

Fiction

Haiti and New York; 1970s-1990s

First-person omniscient

Tone: wistful, solemn, meditative

Mood: moody, sentimental, dreamy, haunting

Protagonist: Sophie | Antagonist: sometimes Martine, inner demons/the past

Will Sophie and/or Martine be able to face their past?

The story reaches its climax when Martine kills herself.

1. When Sophie moves to New York, her mother shows her into her new room. There, Sophie sees a picture from when she was a baby and realizes that she doesn’t resemble her relatives at all. This scene foreshadows Martine’s secret about Sophie’s father.
2. When Sophie and Atie drive away to take Sophie to the airport, she looks back and sees no daffodils, foreshadowing that she is going to a new world, a world of Martine, a world not of yellow but of red.
3. Atie tells Sophie as she says goodbye the second time she comes to Haiti that she must love her mother because she will not always be there; Martine dies not long after.

1. "I already know the end." Sophie's grandmother says this when she sees a macoute push his gun into Dessalines; it is a simple statement that implies so much worse.

1. Erzulie: the Vodou spirit of love and women and beauty
2. When Marc asks what Sophie thinks he wants, he jokes that it is life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness, an allusion to the Declaration of Independence
3. Haitian politics: dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier, the tonton macoutes, etc.
4. Papa Shango: the Yoruba deity (orisha) associated with thunder and lightning

See Imagery section

1. Marc is presented in a paradoxical way: Marc is placed somewhere in the middle of being a Haitian and an American. Marc is a successful Haitian who makes a name and wealth for himself. Despite integrating himself easily in the American society, he searches obsessively for the authentic Haitian experience, be it food or culture. Because he is successful, Marc feels as if he doesn’t belong anywhere: he is not really an American but he is not a Haitian either.

1. Sophie's troubles with sex parallel her mother's.
2. Sophie doubles, just as Martine does.
3. Martine, Sophie, and Brigitte have parallel nightmares, though they differ in intensity.

1. "If you make something of yourself in life, then we will all succeed. You can raise our heads" (44). This is an example of metonymy in which head stands for people as a whole.

1. "They all kept screaming and hollering, as my grandmother's tears bathed the corpse's face" (5).
2. "When it rains, it is the sky that is crying" (28).