In our society abuse of power, pain and suffering is talked about in many different ways. However, most people don't know how grueling it is to actually go through and recover from such an ordeal. In the novel “Breath Eyes Memory” by Edwidge Danticat, the narrator Sophie moves from Haiti to New York to amass with her mother and escape their past. They struggle to survive in the big city and find it hard to escape from their appalling past. Danticat illustrates the effects of having constantly try escaping from your painful past. Through the use of characterization Danticat illustrates the effects Abuse of power and how that can affect people. When sophie moves to NYC, her mother begins to try and take power over her to ensure the same mistakes she had made wouldn't come back around and hit sophie the same way it hit Martine. By doing so she endures in an act of “testing”, “I closed my eyes upon the images of my mother slipping her hand under the sheets and poking her pinky at a void, hoping that it would go no further than the length of her fingernail’”(155). By including this. Danticat reveals that Martine controls Sophie and is putting Sophie'’s health at risk. In other words, Martines controlling over sophie foreshadows and …show more content…
She utilizes conventions such as Characterization and theme. These help to convey the message that Martine follows her haitian family tradition by testing her daughter to make sure she stays “pure”, This leads sophie to a life of unstability and pain. It is important to see the connection between this and the characters because they show how hard it is to try and escape your past with a significant example on it. Abuse of power isn't easy to deal with. In fact many people have committed suicide due to Trauma etc. Breath, Eyes, Memory is a narrowing tale of perserverance in the face of
Irish Playwright, George Bernard Shaw, once said, “The worst sin toward our fellow creatures is not to hate them, but to be indifferent to them; that's the essence of inhumanity.” Inhumanity is mankind’s worse attribute. Every so often, ordinary humans are driven to the point were they have no choice but to think of themselves. One of the most famous example used today is the Holocaust. Elie Wiesel’s memoir Night demonstrates how fear is a debilitating force that causes people to lose sight of who they once were. After being forced into concentration camps, Elie was rudely awakened into reality. Traumatizing incidents such as Nazi persecution or even the mistreatment among fellow prisoners pushed Elie to realize the cruelty around him; Or even the wickedness Elie himself is capable of doing. This resulted in the loss of faith, innocence, and the close bonds with others.
When Marie tries to ask the protagonist to take a walk, this action shows that she is trying to achieve Pauline’s dream by getting her outside of the house. Therefore, she could finally feel the true meaning of freedom. Nevertheless, Pauline’s mother’s response demonstrates that she wants her daughter’s safety more than anything. The mother tries to keep Pauline away from the danger, so the protagonist can at last have a healthier life. However, Agathe’s reply shows that her mother is willing to sacrifice Pauline’s dream to keep her secure. Therefore, the author uses contrasting characters to mention that safety is more valuable. Furthermore, the protagonist starts to describe Tante Marie and reveals that she always has her hair “around her shoulder” (85). When Pauline describes Marie, Pauline shows how her Tante is open-minded. In fact, Marie helps Pauline to let go of her limitations and to get a taste of her dream. Therefore, Marie always wants Pauline to go outside and play hockey or even to take a walk. These actions that Pauline’s Tante takes show how she is determinate to make Pauline’s dream come true. Thus, the author
Though, acceptance of trauma can allow hindered development, eventually allowing full self-acceptance. Bernice, a once strong woman has been verbally, emotionally and physically abused since her childhood. Resulting in a loss of her sense of being. Within the beginning of the novel, when she is reflecting on her past memories, it becomes clear to the reader that in order for her to be able to accept herself, she needs to surface her past traumas. Bernice explains that, “In the tendrils, Bernice realizes there is remorse in her body and she is trying to kick it out. Her shell rejects remorse. Shame. Feeling bad over feeling good” (49). This mindset is negative and expresses her inability to share her emotions due to previous emotional abuse from her family and the many men that have taken advantage of her. This idea of disallowing happiness hinders her ability to accept herself and her past actions. However, through more time of self-reflection (over 200 hundred pages of her lying in bed with the author switching perspectives, confusing the hell out of me lol) Bernice realizes that she must learn to cope with these traumas and attempt to have a positive outlook on life. As Bernice is accepting the damaged part of herself, she comes to the realization that, “She can feel her body now, its loose and stiff at the same time. Her head, though will be the hard part. Part of her lost for so long that it is hard to enunciate what, exactly, she has found” (228). In comparison to when Bernice was unable to acknowledge her feelings and thoughts, it is now clear that she is slowly learning to manage her issues. By Bernice discovering that she is beginning to acknowledge her thoughts, this is the first step to being able to accept one’s self. In Total, It is shown that Bernice is deeply affected by the trauma within her life, however she is able to
pity in the reader by reflecting on the traumatic childhood of her father, and establishes a cause
The heroine, Mrs. P, has some carries some characteristics parallel to Louise Mallard in “Hour.” The women of her time are limited by cultural convention. Yet, Mrs. P, (like Louise) begins to experience a new freedom of imagination, a zest for life , in the immediate absence of her husband. She realizes, through interior monologues, that she has been held back, that her station in life cannot and will not afford her the kind of freedom to explore freely and openly the emotions that are as much a part of her as they are not a part of Leonce. Here is a primary irony.
The book is sectioned into three sections. The three sections were the stories of three kids, who were going through the same tragedy but in there view. I liked the way she did this because not only gave you a detailed look through one child, but you go to experience the knowledge of three different children and what they thought. It makes it possible for more people to be able to relate to this book.
No one understands such a dreadful experience as the Holocaust without shifting in the way you were before. In Night, a memoir by Elie Wiesel, the author defines his suffering at the hands of Nazis. Taken with his family in 1944, they were directed to Auschwitz to come before the dishonorable selection. There, Elie parted from his mom and sister leaving him with his father who was too busy to spend any time with his son before the camp. Being under the Nazis' control, Elie and his father moved to several camps. The Nazi command “deprived Elie...of the desire to live..., which murdered his God and soul and turned my dreams to dust” (32).
Trauma: an emotional shock causing lasting and substantial damage to a person’s psychological development. Linda Krumholz in the African American Review claims the book Beloved by Toni Morrison aids the nation in the recovery from our traumatic history that is blemished with unfortunate occurrences like slavery and intolerance. While this grand effect may be true, one thing that is absolute is the lesson this book preaches. Morrison’s basic message she wanted the reader to recognize is that life happens, people get hurt, but to let the negative experiences overshadow the possibility of future good ones is not a good way to live. Morrison warns the reader that sooner or later you will have to choose between letting go of the past or it will forcibly overwhelm you. In order to cement to the reader the importance of accepting one’s personal history, Morrison uses the tale of former slave Sethe to show the danger of not only holding on to the past, but to also deny the existence and weight of the psychological trauma it poses to a person’s psyche. She does this by using characters and their actions to symbolize the past and acceptance of its existence and content.
Ida Fink’s work, “The Table”, is an example of how old or disturbing memories may not contain the factual details required for legal documentation. The purpose of her writing is to show us that people remember traumatic events not through images, sounds, and details, but through feelings and emotions. To break that down into two parts, Fink uses vague characters to speak aloud about their experiences to prove their inconsistencies, while using their actions and manners to show their emotions as they dig through their memories in search of answers in order to show that though their spoken stories may differ, they each feel the same pain and fear.
When Zora Hurston wrote this novel, she wanted to explain how a young women search for her own identity. This young woman would go through three relationships that took her to the end of the journey of a secure sense of independence. She wanted to find her own voice while in a relationship, but she also witnessed hate, pain, and love through the journey. When Logan Killicks came she witnessed the hate because he never connected physically or emotionally to her. Jody Starks, to what she assumed, as the ticket to freedom. What she did not know was the relationship came with control and pain. When she finally meets Tea Cake she was in love, but had to choose life over love in the end.
PASSAGE 1: The first passage I would like to discuss is “A short, sleeveless shift was all that covered her, but she wasn’t cold. The temperature in the room was precisely calibrated to keep her comfortable. Punishment was meted out in other ways: in increments of solitude, monotony and, harshest of all, self-reflection, both figurative and literal. She hadn’t yet seen the mirrors, but she could feel them shimmering at the edges of her awareness, waiting to show her what she’d become.” (page 1) There is something to be said about the indomitable human spirit when faced with outer turmoil. I believe that when people outwardly subject others to torture, it is easier for the tortured to identify the torturer and outwardly resist. Survival instincts kick in and a person does whatever it takes to endure the process by focusing and both the pain and the person who is inflicting it. However, when there is no active act of torture and one is left to their own dark thoughts the mental anguish can be harder to endure then the physical pain. Before the protagonist is released into society, where she will most likely be stigmatized as she had stigmatized the “Reds” before, she must endure her own stigmatization, self-loathing and dejection, all while feeling very publicly exposed. Studies have shown that solitary confinement causes psychological issues as well, so it may be extremely difficult on her mental state and have long term psychological effects.
Although in Breath, Eyes, Memory, by Edwidge Danticat, Sophie loves and cares very much for her mother Martine, the relationship between the two women is strained and somewhat adversarial. This is due to the negative circumstances surrounding Sophie's existence. Sophie is the product of her mother's rape, and her mother can not stop thinking about this aspect of their relationship. She has nightmares about the rape every night, and these nightmares are more intense when Sophie is living with her.
Scarry informs us that “A great deal . . . is at stake in the attempt to invent linguistic structures that will reach and accommodate this area of experience normally so inaccessible to language; the human attempt to reverse the de-objectifying work of pain by forcing pain itself into avenues of objectification is a project laden with practical and ethical consequence” (6). She argues that because pain obliterates language and thought, the language people attempt to create to expresses the experience is often inadequate. But, genres such as the slave narrative and the neo-slave narrative problematize Scarry’s arguments by pointing to the fact that a usable language can be created from pain, and often this language takes form in the shape of metaphors, similes, and analogies. Though Scarry argues that language does not effectively articulate pain, slave narratives have done a remarkable job of articulating the experience of enslaved black people. Authors such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Ann Jacobs, who have written slave narratives, not only effectively created the language they needed to articulate their experiences, but they show how in their most intense moments of pain, knowledge can be born. For example, Frederick Douglass discusses how he was beaten daily under the care of one of his overseers, Covey. During these beatings, thought was not obliterated; instead, Douglass was able to establish a new epistemology about slavery. This pain created a clear knowledge of how violence and brutal workloads were used to break a human and make a willing and “mindless” slave, and he was to convey this knowledge later in his own slave
The point of view she expressed through out the whole text, was her own. She was able to keep readers insight of the psychoanalytic theory the story has. The actions the protagonist had in the story showed us how it affected her adult self, and how the issue developed a rebel over time. Even after years from when the recurring events took place, her actions as a child had an effect on both mother and daughter. This theory gives readers the idea that things that happen to people during childhood can contribute to the way they later function as
Every human being on earth accumulates scars of this nature. From errors made in the past come forth blemishes on the soul that serve as permanent reminders of one’s mistakes, and the scars provide maps to roads not to be taken again.