Rising Action
The rising action of the story is when Sophie leaves Haiti at age twelve to join her mother in the United States in New York. Sophie, despite her mother’s warnings to focus on school and no men, falls in love with Joseph, a musician who lives next door to them. Sophie is caught one night by her mother when she returns home late. Her mother in turn begins testing her constantly to make sure she is still a virgin. Depression causes Sophie to act irrationally. One night she decides to impale herself with her mother’s spice pestle so she can fail the test. When she fails her mother’s test, she is thrown out of the house. She then elopes with Joseph and they marry.
Read more about this topic: Breath, Eyes, Memory
Famous quotes containing the words rising and/or action:
“Oh, what a catastrophe for man when he cut himself off from the rhythm of the year, from his unison with the sun and the earth. Oh, what a catastrophe, what a maiming of love when it was a personal, merely personal feeling, taken away from the rising and the setting of the sun, and cut off from the magic connection of the solstice and the equinox!”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“These people who are always briskly doing something and as busy as waltzing mice, they have little, sharp, staccato ideas.... But they have no slow, big ideas. And the fewer consoling, noble, shining, free, jovial, magnanimous ideas that come, the more nervously and desperately they rush and run from office to office and up and downstairs, thinking by action at last to make life have some warmth and meaning.”
—Brenda Ueland (1891–1985)