Previous
Part 1, Chapter 8: Bride
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in God Help the Child, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inherited Trauma
Racism and Colorism
Child Abuse and Healing
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love
Summary
Analysis
Sofia isn’t allowed to be around children. Now that she is on parole, she has a job at a nursing home. She likes the job because it’s quiet and is away from people. This is especially nice after being in Decagon for so long—the prison was full of noise, fights, and shouting. Julie, Sofia’s cellmate, was her only friend in prison. Julie had smothered her disabled daughter. Since they had both abused children, Sofia and Julie were considered the lowest of the low among the prisoners. In prison, Sofia only received two letters from her husband, Jack. Otherwise, Sofia followed the rules and read a lot of books. In the taxi, after she was released, Sofia felt like “a little kid seeing the world for the first time.” When Bride came to her door at the motel, Sofia’s “fists took over,” and she felt like she was fighting the devil.
This section is the first in the novel from Sofia’s point of view, and it establishes ambiguity surrounding Sofia’s innocence and guilt. Sofia does not attest to her own innocence in this section, though she does liken Bride to the devil, implying that, in her mind, Bride is the one in the wrong, not her. Even if Sofia claims she's innocent, that doesn’t prove she is. By introducing Sofia as a narrator of her own experience and drawing a direct comparison between her and Bride—and suggesting that Bride may be in the wrong, not Sofia—the novel presents a complicated picture of the relationships between innocence, guilt, self-acceptance, and forgiveness. The ambiguity points to the novel’s contention that people are often both innocent and guilty at once and are rarely only one or the other.
Themes
