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Sophie's Choice

First edition cover
Author	William Styron
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre	Novel
Publisher	Random House
Publication date	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 is a novel by William Styron published in 1979. It concerns 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.

Sophie's Choice won the National Book Award for fiction in 1980.

Plot summary

Sophie's Choice is narrated by Stingo, a writer recalling the summer when he began his first novel.

As the story begins, in the early summer of 1947, Stingo (like Styron, a writer and Duke graduate) has been fired from his low-level reader's job at the publisher McGraw Hill and has moved into a cheap apartment building in Brooklyn, where he hopes to devote some months to his writing. While he is working on his novel, he is drawn into the lives of the lovers Nathan Landau and Sophie Zawistowska, fellow inhabitants of the building, who are involved in an intense and difficult relationship. Sophie is a beautiful, Polish-Catholic survivor of the concentration camps of World War II, and Nathan is a Jewish-American - and, purportedly, a genius. Although Nathan claims to be a Harvard graduate and a cellular biologist with a pharmaceutical company, it is later revealed that this is a fabrication. He is actually a paranoid schizophrenic, though almost no one knows, including Sophie and Stingo -- though Sophie is aware that Nathan is self-medicating with drugs, including cocaine, that he easily obtains at Pfizer, his employer. This means that although he often behaves quite normally and generously, there are times that he becomes frighteningly jealous, violent, and delusional.

As the story progresses, Sophie tells Stingo of her past, of which she has never before spoken. She describes her violently anti-Semitic father, a law professor in Kracow; her unwillingness to help him spread his ideas; her arrest by the Nazis for smuggling ham to her mother, who was on her deathbed; and particularly, her brief stint as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolph Höß, the commander of Auschwitz, where she was interned. She specifically relates her attempts to seduce Höß in an effort to persuade him that her blonde, blue-eyed, German-speaking son, called Jan, should be allowed to leave the camp and enter the Lebensborn program, in which he would be raised as a German child. She failed in this attempt and, ultimately, never learned of her son's fate. Only at the end of the book do we also learn what became of Sophie's daughter, named Eva.

As Nathan's "outbreaks" become more violent and abusive, Stingo receives a summons from Nathan's brother, Larry. He learns that Nathan is schizophrenic and is not a cellular biologist, although, as Larry says, "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 attempt to flee to a peanut farm in Virginia that Stingo's father has inherited. On the way there, Sophie reveals her deepest, darkest secret: on the night that she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor made her choose which of her two children 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 in mourning and filled with a guilt that she cannot overcome. By now alcoholic and deeply depressed, she is clearly willing to self-destruct with Nathan, who has already tried to persuade her to commit suicide with him. Despite the fact that Stingo proposes marriage to her, and despite a shared night that relieves Stingo of his embarrassing virginity and fulfills many of his sexual fantasies, Sophie disappears, leaving only a note in which she says that she must return to Nathan.

Upon arriving back in Brooklyn, Stingo discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide via sodium cyanide. Although Stingo is devastated, the last sentence in the novel, taken from Emily Dickinson's poem, Ample Make This Bed, suggests, perhaps, 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 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.

Controversy

The book "was considered 'disturbing' and was banned from several libraries."

Film, TV or theatrical adaptations

Main article: Sophie's Choice (film)

The novel was made into a film of the same name in 1982. Written and directed by Alan J. Pakula, the film was nominated for Academy Awards for its screenplay, musical score, cinematography, and costume design, as well as the performance of Meryl Streep in the title role. Only Streep received a statue.

External links

• Sophie's Choice Book Notes from Literapedia