Sophie's Choice (novel)
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 First edition cover |
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| Author | William Styron |
|---|---|
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Genre(s) | Novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
| Released | 1979 |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 515 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0394461096 |
| Preceded by | The Confessions of Nat Turner |
| Followed by | Darkness Visible |
Sophie's Choice (1979) is a novel written by William Styron about a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. An immediate bestseller and the basis of a successful film, the novel is often considered both Styron's best work and a major novel of the twentieth century. The difficult decision that shapes the character Sophie is sometimes used as an idiom. A "Sophie's Choice" is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.
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[edit] Plot summary
Sophie's Choice begins with the departure of its narrator, Stingo, from a stultifying position at a New York publishing house and his move to a Brooklyn boarding house to begin work on his own novel. (The early portion of the novel is closely based on Styron's own postwar experiences as a reader at McGraw-Hill). As his work progresses, Stingo supports himself with funds unexpectedly received, many years after the fact, from the unjust sale of one of his grandfather's slaves, Artiste -- an irony on which Stingo frequently reflects.
Stingo soon finds himself drawn into the lives of his upstairs neighbors, Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and Nathan Landau, a brilliant young Jewish man who claims to be a Harvard graduate and cellular biologist. Sophie and Nathan are lovers, but their relationship is punctuated by Nathan's escalating fits of jealousy and violence. Stingo quickly falls in lust with Sophie, though since he lacks the opportunity to woo her and also idolizes the charismatic Nathan, he continues to try to lose his virginity with other women, in tragi-comic episodes trenchantly revealing of late 1940s attitudes towards sex and sexuality.
Stingo gradually reveals Sophie’s past to the reader as she reveals it to him: the anti-Semitism of her father in Kraków; her refusal to aid the Polish underground movement during World War II; her own incarceration in Auschwitz for attempting to smuggle meat into the city for her dying mother. Sophie's story, which Stingo receives piecemeal, is supplemented by Stingo's own, later, research into the Holocaust. In particular, Sophie recounts her brief experience as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolph Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. We learn that Sophie attempted to seduce Höss in order to have her blonde, blue-eyed, German-speaking son, also confined in the camp, transferred into the Lebensborn program, which would have allowed him to be raised as a German child. When Sophie failed, she was returned to the camp, where she nearly died from malnutrition before her liberation. She never learned the fate of her son.
As Nathan's behavior becomes more erratic and abusive, Sophie tells Stingo about Nathan's past attempt to make a suicide pact with her. Answering a summons from Nathan’s brother Larry, Stingo discovers that Nathan is not a research scientist but rather a repeatedly-institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic. When Nathan’s jealous imaginings focus on Stingo and he threatens their lives, Stingo and Sophie attempt to flee to a Virginia farm belonging to Stingo's father. En route, Stingo learns Sophie's deepest secret: when she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor ordered her to choose between the lives of her 7-year-old daughter, Eva, and her 10-year-old son, Jan. With only seconds to decide, she chose her son, leaving her with a guilt that she cannot overcome.
Stingo proposes marriage, and the pair share a single night of passionate sex before Sophie disappears. After following her back to New York, Stingo discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide in Sophie's apartment by swallowing cyanide capsules. Despite his devastation at the discovery, the novel closes with Stingo awakening on a beach and observing, with a quotation from Emily Dickinson (whose work plays a small but crucial role in the story), that it is morning -- "excellent and fair" -- suggesting a remaining shred of optimism.
[edit] Style
Sophie's Choice is a realistic novel largely narrated in the first person by an older Stingo, now a successful novelist, but also including Sophie's (frequently revised) memories of her childhood, wartime Warsaw, and her imprisonment at Auschwitz -- presented in both the first and third persons. The narrative is therefore complex, moving back and forth in time between Stingo's description of the summer of 1947 and his relationship with Sophie and Nathan, his own earlier life in Virginia, and Sophie's experiences. In addition, the mature Stingo digresses at length both on his attitudes as a youth (occasionally including his journal entries, particularly after sexual experiences) as well as on the broader issues involving the American South and the Holocaust.
[edit] Major themes
One of the most important parallels in Sophie's Choice, as Stingo explicitly points out, is between the worst abuses of the American South — both its slave-holding past and the lynchings of the book's present — and Polish anti-Semitism. Just as Sophie is left conflicted by her father's attitudes towards Poland's Jews, Stingo analyzes his own culpability derived from his family's slave-holding past, eventually deciding to write a book about Nat Turner — an obvious parallel to Styron's own controversial novel The Confessions of Nat Turner.
Similarly, by placing a non-Jewish character at the center of an Auschwitz story, Styron suggests the universality of the suffering under the Third Reich. Though several characters, including Stingo, discuss in detail the fact that the Jewish people suffered far more than other groups, Stingo also describes Hitler's attempts to eliminate the Slavs or turn them into slave labor and makes the case that the Holocaust cannot be understood as an exclusively Jewish tragedy. In contrast, Nathan, whose paranoid condition makes him particularly sensitive about his ethnicity, is the novel's prime spokesman for this exclusivity. His inability to cope with the fact that Sophie, a Polish-Catholic raised in an anti-Semitic nation, shared the sufferings of European Jews, while he was prevented, by his mental illness, from even enlisting in the military, causes him to accuse Sophie of complicity in the Holocaust and leads to their mutual destruction.
[edit] Controversy
The book has been banned from many librarys world wide for Styron's use of profanity and graphic sexuality throughout the novel. Although this is altogether true, the author used these themes to create a realistic playout for the characters and to paint as vivid a picture as possible of what the times were like.
[edit] Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
Sophie's Choice was made into a major motion picture in 1982.
