Sophie's Choice
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Sophie's Choice (1979) is a novel written by William Styron about a young American Southerner who wants to be a writer and befriends Nathan, who is Jewish, and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but not Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. An immediate bestseller and a successful film, the novel is often considered both Styron's best work and a major novel of the twentieth century.
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Plot summary
Sophie's Choice begins with its narrator, Stingo, leaving at a stultifying position at a New York publishing house and resettling in a Brooklyn boarding house to begin work on his own novel. As his work progresses, Stingo supports himself with funds unexpectedly remaining 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 falls immediately in love with Sophie, though lacking the opportunity to woo her and also idolizing the charistmatic Nathan, he continues trying to lose his virginity with other women.
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 mother. Sophie’s own story, which Stingo only has in portions, is supplemented by Stingo’s own, later, research into the Holocaust. Particularly Sophie recounts her experiences working as a typist in the home of Rudolph Höss, designer and commander of Auschwitz. Sophie attempts to seduce Höss in order to have her son, also confined in the camp, transferred under the Lebensborn plan, which would allow him to be raised as a German child. When Sophie fails, she is returned to the camp, where she nearly dies from malnutrition before her liberation; she never learns the fate of her son.
Sophie also tells of Nathan’s past attempt to make a suicide pact, as his present-day behavior becomes increasingly erratic. Answering a summons from Nathan’s brother Larry, Stingo discovers that Nathan is not at all a research scientist, but rather a repeatedly-institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic. When Nathan’s jealous imaginings seize on Stingo, Stingo and Sophie flee to an old farm of Stingo’s family in Virginia. En route, Stingo proposes marriage, and learns Sophie’s last secret: upon entering the camp, a sadistic doctor ordered Sophie to choose between her 4-year-old daughter, Eva, and her 10-year-old son, Jan. With only seconds to decide, she chooses her son to live, leaving her with a guilt that she will never defeat.
Stingo proposes marriage, and the pair share a single night of passionate sex before Sophie disappears. After hurrying back to New York behind her, Stingo finds Sophie and Nathan dead in Sophie’s apartment, having swallowed cyanide capsules. Despite his devastation at the discovery, the novel closes with Stingo awaking on a beach and observing that it is morning, suggesting a remaining optimism.
Style
Sophie’s Choice is a realistic first person novel. The story is ostensibly told by a much older Stingo, now a successful novelist, remembering this tragic event of his youth. The older Stingo digresses at length on his attitudes as a youth (occasionally including his journal entries, particularly after sexual experiences) as well as the broader issues of the American South and the Holocaust.
Themes
One of the most important parallels in Sophie’s Choice, as Stingo explicitly points out, is the similarities 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 family’s own dealings with Poland’s Jews, Stingo analyzes his own culpability in 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 how the Jewish people suffered far worse than any others, Stingo also describes Hitler’s attempts to eliminate the Russian and particularly the Polish people of Europe, making a 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 deal with Sophie’s possible complicity in the Holocaust leads to both of their destructions.
Film
The 1982 film adaptation of the same name was directed by Alan J. Pakula, who also wrote the screenplay. Sophie was played by Meryl Streep, Nathan by Kevin Kline. Meryl Streep won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance, and the film was nominated in four other categories.