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Sophie's Choice | Introduction

William Styron’s 1979 novel Sophie’s Choice consists of a story within a story. The first story is of the summer of 1947 when the narrator, then age twenty-two and using the nickname Stingo, loses his job at McGraw-Hill in New York City. He moves to a Brooklyn boarding house where he sets about writing what he hopes will be the next great American novel. While Stingo tries to write this book, using the recent suicide of a childhood friend as a catalyst, he becomes involved with two other residents, the co-dependent Sophie and the psychotic drug addict Nathan. The second story emerges piecemeal from Sophie, who tells Stingo about her life over the past decade: of living in Cracow, Poland, the daughter of a university professor; of her marriage to her father’s protégé; of living with her two children in Warsaw after her father and husband are murdered; and of her imprisonment at Auschwitz. Because she survived, Sophie feels implicated in Nazi atrocities. She is ashamed of her father’s fascist beliefs and guilt-ridden for having helped with his pamphlet advocating the extermination of the Jews, for failing to protect her children, and for using her father’s views as an argument to wangle her freedom from the camp. Her abusive relationship with Nathan exacerbates these feelings. Alcohol abuse by all three characters makes matters worse.

The nature of evil and the widening circle of implicating others in its perpetuation constitutes the central subject in this novel. In addition to that subject, however, the novel takes itself as its subject. In a surprisingly self-referential and reflexive way, the novel is about writing a novel. It describes Stingo’s uncertainty and writer’s block; it includes drafts from 1947 and criticizes them from the narrator’s 1977 perspective.

The novel is also about the real world on which it is based. Like other works of historical fiction, it presents historical characters in fictional roles. It also breaks the illusion of that fictive world with digressions: on World War II; on the nature of evil; on recommended readings for public school children (although given its obscenity Sophie’s Choice itself is probably not appropriate); and on Elie Wiesel’s criticism of novels on the Holocaust. In sum, it may be safe to say that storytelling is both the method and the examined subject of Sophie’s Choice.

 

Sophie's Choice Summary

Chapter 1

Set in New York in the summer of 1947 and told from the first person point of view, Sophie’s Choice begins with Stingo, a McGraw-Hill assistant editor, ranting about the “clubfooted syntax” and “unrelenting mediocrity” of other people’s manuscripts. But Stingo also admits he rejected the manuscript of Kon-Tiki, a work that later became a “great classic of modern adventure.” As Stingo toys with the idea of becoming a writer, he copes with sexual frustration and the reality of being a virgin. To sublimate his sex drive, he plunges into “make-believe” fiction, avoiding his “homework . . . composing jacket blurbs.” Stingo loses his job, and Mr. Farrell urges him to “write [his] guts out.”

The narrator reveals that it is now thirty years later; the year is 1977. He is looking back to that summer when he set out to be a writer, when he still went by his childhood nickname Stingo. Readers learn in the course of the novel that, at fifty-two, the narrator is a successful author of several novels, including one on Nat Turner. Stingo thus emerges as the simulacrum of William Styron.

Thus, the chapter is devoted to writing, publication, writers, editors, and editors who are would-be writers. It echoes the famous line from Moby Dick (“Call me Ishmael”) in the narrator’s comment, “Call me Stingo,” and refers to famous American writers, such as Katherine Porter, John Hersey, and Thomas Wolfe.

Chapter 2

As the now-unemployed Stingo considers his next move, a letter providentially arrives from his father, explaining an inheritance Stingo is to receive. The legacy is proceeds from the sale of a named slave Artiste. The father explains that Stingo’s great-grandfather sold Artiste, “an innocent boy of 16 into the grinding hell of the Georgia turpentine forests.” The recently discovered and appraised eight hundred dollars in gold coin allots to Stingo a legacy of five hundred dollars. Ironically, profits from the slave trade will support Stingo, who is to write novels about racism.

Stingo moves to Yetta Zimmerman’s “unrelievedly pink” boarding house in Brooklyn. There he faces the “simultaneously enfeebling and insulting . . . empty page.” Frustrated with not writing and “a little goatish,” he hears a creaking bed in the apartment overhead. He meets Morris Fink, who describes the lovers, Sophie and Nathan. Next, Stingo witnesses the couple fighting and after the verbally abusive Nathan leaves, Stingo meets Sophie, with whom he falls “fathomlessly in love.” Seeing the tattooed number on her arm, he assumes she is Jewish.

Chapter 3

Stingo is amazed the next day by Sophie and Nathan’s happy invitation to join them for a day at Coney Island. Nathan undergoes “a remarkable transformation,” flipping from abuser to gentleman and back to abuser. Hungry for friendship, however, Stingo ignores the signs of something wrong. Nathan accuses Stingo as a Southerner of being complicit in the lynching of Bobby Weed. Nathan says: “The fate of Bobby Weed at the hands of white Southern Americans is as bottomlessly barbaric as any act performed by the Nazis during the rule of Adolf Hitler.” Sixteen-year-old Weed was accused like the slave Artiste and died in the same Georgia forest where Artiste disappeared. Stingo remarks that he should have seen the signs, packed up, and left; had he done so there would be “no story at all to tell.” Instead, he chooses to “plunge on toward Coney Island,” assuming that the three of them will be “‘the best of friends.’”

Chapter 4

Sophie describes her childhood in Cracow. She explains that Nathan, when he is in one of his fits, accuses her of being anti-Semitic because she is Polish. She feels guilty about the fact that Poland was strongly anti-Semitic, and she equates this feeling with what Stingo must feel being from the racist South. The Germans arrived in Cracow in September 1939 and immediately executed all university faculty, including her father and husband. She says: “only a Jesus who had no pity and who no longer cared for me could permit the people I loved to be killed and let me live with such guilt.” Stingo sums up more of Sophie’s story, including her arrival in New York, her experience of “digital rape” on a train, her work for the chiropractor Dr. Blackstock, and her meeting Nathan Landau, who rescues her when she collapses at the Brooklyn Public Library. He also points out that Sophie lies about the past. For example, she claims here that Nathan is her second sexual partner. Later, she tells about Jozef, her lover in Warsaw. Stingo says that he “was fated to get ensnared, like some hapless June bug, in the incredible spider’s nest of emotions that made up the relation between Sophie and Nathan.”

Chapter 5

Stingo’s father writes again, with news of another inheritance, this time a peanut farm allocated in the will of a friend, just the place for Stingo to live and write. Stingo languishes with his novel idea, thinks his idea “pathetically derivative” because in his novel about Maria Hunt, he wants to “do for a small Southern city what James Joyce” did for Dublin—“invent Dixieland replicas of Stephen Dedalus and the imperishable Blooms.” (Instead, the mature narrator writes a novel about Stingo and the “perishable” Sophie and Nathan.) Enflaming Stingo’s self-doubts, Nathan claims that Southern literature is over and Jewish literature’s day has come. At Coney Island, Stingo meets the “Jewish Madonna” Leslie Lapidus, who invites Stingo to have sex with her. Stingo’s writing on Leslie is quoted and then criticized for its lack of irony. The mature narrator then “rewrites” the scene between Stingo and Leslie, using curiously mock-romantic language. Stingo offers to elucidate Faulkner, whom Sophie is reading, because he has “practically memorized” the collection she is reading.

Chapter 6

Stingo relates how Nathan cared for Sophie after she collapsed in the library, preparing calf’s liver for her because he suspects she suffers from anemia. Nathan is a well-read American Jew, obsessed with World War II atrocities. Sophie reveals she is Polish, not Danish as Nathan first thought. Then she tells Nathan some of her past, beginning with the fact that in April 1943 she was arrested and transported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Because of her perfect German, Sophie is selected to serve as secretary for the Auschwitz commandant, but despite this favored position, she contracts scurvy and scarlet fever. Again, Stingo points out “that Sophie was not quite straightforward in her recital of past events.” The mature narrator reflects that her “hideous sense of guilt” caused her repeatedly to reassess the past. The narrator quotes Simone Weil’s explanation of survivor... » Complete Sophie's Choice Summary