Sophia Monologue

this time it was a little girl, Sophie, standing barefooted and trying uselessly to hide the whole long row of toes that everyone could see on each foot. We all stood looking at her, and waiting. Presently she started to run from one person to another, imploring them to help her, but none of them moved, and none of their faces had any expression. My father started to walk towards her, the knife shining in his hand. Sophie grew frantic; she flitted from one unmoving person to another, tears running down her face. My father, stern, implacable, kept on coming nearer; still no one would move to help her. My father came closer still, with long arms outspread to prevent her bolting as he cornered her. He caught her, and dragged her back to the middle
When Aunt Harriet said 'I shall pray God to send charity into this hideous world, and sympathy for the weak, and love for the unhappy and unfortunate. I shall ask Him if it is indeed His will that a child should suffer and its soul be damned for a little blemish of the body. . . . And I shall pray Him, too, that the hearts of the self-righteous may be broken....' I felt like I knew exactly what she was talking about. In our society, children also do suffer cruelty because of superficial things. This passage is an eye-opener to how terrible both societies are, the author places the birth of Petra to the birth of Aunt Harriet's baby to extensively express his point. The timing of Petra's birth and her cousin expresses the point that while some are in the highest of heights others are in the lowest of lows. It seems extremely unfair how two people suffer for 9 months for a baby, yet one cannot keep it because of one little blemish. The feeling of oppression that we are given in chapter 7 make us reflect on everyday life desperately comparing our society to Waknuk. Clearly, Waknuk is a much more gruesome environment than ours, but in the big picture it is not much better than Waknuk; we still persecute those who don't fit our ideal picture of perfection, and we back-stab our friends and family to keep our standing in society, we are as bad as Joseph and Emily
In this situation, the different gifts and uniqueness given from God were no longer a blessing, they just a step up from a cursing. For example, we are like tigers standing in the midst of lions, too afraid to show our stripes. Just because we covered our stripes on the surface doesn't mean they weren't there. Although we can hide our uniqueness and live indistinguishably from our Society, we cannot hide from God, or fool him. In fact, we are guilty of living a negative life of timidity, fraud, secrecy, and lies. However, this pathetic life is our only chance of