Beloved 5

Everyday, people are faced with choices. Some of life’s choices are simple, such as deciding what to wear to school or choosing a television station to watch. Other choices, however, are much more serious and have life-altering consequences. Sethe, the protagonist of Beloved, and Sophie, the main focus in Sophie’s Choice, are mothers that are faced with choices that change their entire lives. While the time period and characters involved differ, the choices of Sethe and Sophie can easily be compared.


First and foremost, Sethe and Sophie both make choices that lead to the killing of their children. In both pieces, the actions of the mothers cause the audience to think twice about the limits of maternal love. Sethe tries to kill her children to save them from a life of slavery. Sethe’s plot was unsuccessful, for only one daughter was murdered. To fully understand Sethe’s actions, the reader must realize that on that August afternoon in 1855, Sethe reaches for the handsaw to protect her children from Schoolteacher. Sethe wants to murder her other children, but they escape before she can harm them. Sethe truly believes that she is saving her family from the pain of slavery, and, as a result, her choice alienates her from the rest of her community. Nobody in the area wants anything to do with Sethe after the death of her daughter.





Like Sethe, Sophie also attempts to spare her family from pain. She is also faced with a gruesome choice that ends up affecting the rest of her life. At Auschwitz, during World War II, Sophie is forced by the Nazis to choose which of her children shall live and which child shall be put to death. Because she sees that her son is stronger and would be more likely to survive the brutality of war, she sends her young daughter to the oven.


The choices of Sethe and Sophie are also similar in the respect that they both involve death, guilt, and pain. Sophie and Sethe both lose children as a result of their...