Monday, April 27, 2009
The fast paced life of Sophie Caco
In Breath, Eyes, and Memory, the reader is introduced to the main character Sophie Caco. The novel contains three parts, and right before every part, the reader is confronted with a major event which happened in the Sophie’s life, but is not given the time to really take it. Each of these parts of the novel moves pretty quickly. In part three, the story continues with Sophie as a now grown married woman with a daughter traveling to her native country to visit with her grandmother, and her aunt Tatie Atie. These huge gaps in the story are not unfamiliar to the reader, but it parallels Sophie’s life because so many changes happen in her life unannounced. First, is when she is told she has to go live with her mother whom she barely knows without any notice? Second, she is kicked out of her house and becomes a wife and a mother within such a short period of time. Sophie never had a chance to slow down and enjoy her life as a young woman; changes came into her life without any warnings, and I believe Danticat has systematically organized the story in this form to represent the jumps in Sophie’s life. The reader has no time to slow down to think ,and process what has happened in the previous chapters because Sophie has not had the time herself to process these events in her life. Life moves fast for the Sophie, the reader just has to catch up with her very eventful life
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It is indeed true that Sophie leads a life of dramatic changes but can they be considered fast? Danticat definitely exercises a format that carries on a tale of life with such a swiftness but I don't believe she has written in such a manner just to show the 'jumps in Sophie's life', but her inability to quickly adapt to her new surrounding environment. For instance, it made be a mind boggling experience for a young girl to relocate to another country at such of a young age, but kids of such age find it much easier to adapt to their environment because their perspectives and social psychology hasn't been fully developed yet. While one can view that her life is fast paced, it is also possible to view that she lingers on her past far more than she should focus on her immediate present. Because she focuses more on the past and its memories at the present, she is unable to live her life as she should and falls behind everyone else around her. Hence every change feels like a jump, because her emotional self is never in sync with where her physical body is.
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