Sophie's Choice (novel)
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| Author | William Styron |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Genre | Novel |
| Publisher | Random House |
Publication date | 1979 |
| Publication place | United States |
| Media type | Print (Hardcover) |
| Pages | 515 pp |
| ISBN | ISBN 0394461096 Parameter error in {{ISBNT}}: invalid character |
| Preceded by | The Confessions of Nat Turner |
| Followed by | Darkness Visible |
Sophie's Choice is a novel by William Styron published in 1979 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.
Plot summary
Sophie's Choice is narrated by Stingo, a young writer longing to begin/finish his first novel. While Stingo is working on his novel, he is slowly drawn into the lives of lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, the inhabitants of the apartment above him. Sophie is a beautiful Polish survivor of the concentration camps of World War II and Nathan is Jewish - and a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist, it is revealed later in the story that this is a fabrication. He is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, though almost no one knows, including Sophie and Stingo. This means that although most times he is fine and normal, there are some times that he is jealous, violent, and delusional.
As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past, of which she has never before spoken. She tells of her anti-Semitic father, her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas, her arrest for smuggling ham to her mother, who was on her deathbed, and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the personal home of Rudolph Höß, the commander of Auschwitz. She relates her attempts to seduce Höß to ensure that her blonde, blue-eyed, German speaking son be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed and never learned of her son's fate.
As Nathan's "outbreaks" become more and more violent and abusive, Stingo receives a summons from Nathan's brother Larry. Stingo learns that Nathan is schizophrenic and is not a cellular biologist although "he could have been fantastically brilliant at anything he might have tried out…But he never got his mind in order." Nathan's delusions have led him to believe that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie, and he threatens to kill them both.
Sophie and Stingo flee to Stingo's father's peanut farm in Virginia. While on the way there, Sophie reveals her deepest, darkest secret: the night she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor made her choose which child would die immediately by gassing, and which would continue to live, albeit in the camp. Of her two children, Sophie chose to sacrifice her seven year old daughter, Eva, in a heart-rending decision that has left her mourning and filled with a guilt that she has not, or rather cannot, overcome. Also on the journey to his father's peanut farm in Virginia, Stingo proposes marriage to Sophie. She refuses, but he persuades her to think it over. After sharing but a single night together, before they reach the farm, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note that says that she must return to Nathan.
Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo discovers that both Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide in their room by way of sodium cyanide. Although Stingo is devastated, the last sentence in the novel suggests maybe a shred of optimism:
This was not judgment day, only morning.
Morning: excellent and fair.
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.
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 Nazi 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, 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.
Another major theme explored in the novel is guilt. Sophie explains, “I feel so much guilt over all the things I done there. And over just being alive. This guilt is something I cannot get rid of and I think I never will…I know I will never get rid of it. Never. And because I never get rid of it, maybe that’s the worst thing the Germans left me with” (311).
Controversy
The book has been banned from many libraries world wide for Styron's use of profanity and graphic sexuality throughout the novel.[citation needed]
Another controversy the novel has stirred up concerns the literal choice Sophie made between her son and daughter. In some literary circles, there is a strong emphasis placed on the fact that she chose her daughter over her son, placing it in the context of feminism versus male chauvinism.[citation needed] It is not clear, however, whether it would have been less controversial had she made the opposite choice.
Film, TV or theatrical adaptations
The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1982. Written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, the film won Academy Awards for its screenplay, musical score, cinematography, and costume design, as well as the performance of Meryl Streep in the title role.