to use Steiner’s words, while Stingo was hoping to bulk up his weight in order to pass the physical examination for entrance into the Marines. Sophie was already starving and would continue to starve; Stingo was trying to increase his weight. He had not yet heard of Auschwitz.

      Ironically, Stingo’s first season as a writer, who will in time publish books about Nazism and racism, is financed by money he inherits from his great-grandfather’s sale of the slave called Artiste. Does that make Stingo responsible for slavery? Styron would probably answer that it connects Stingo to a slave culture. Nathan taunts Stingo with Southern racism, with the fact that Southern whites lynch blacks, and Stingo winces in tracing parallels between the Georgia lynching of Bobby Weed and the fate of Artiste. As long as people disconnect from the evil, see it as true of others but not true of themselves, they separate themselves from others, assigning to others what they insist is not true of themselves. Thus, they affirm otherness and hierarchy. This action fuels oppression and all its attending ills. The collision of stories in the book brings about Stingo’s awakening to the humanity of all people and to the implied responsibility all people, however remote, share in oppression. Thus, Styron establishes a connection between Stingo’s past regarding slavery and Sophie’s past regarding the Third Reich.

      The book’s title directs readers to another connection. Sophie makes two major “choices,” one in the past, one in the present summer; arguably neither one is a deliberate and free choice. First, she is coerced to select between her two children when they first arrive at Auschwitz. Second, in Washington, D.C., Sophie leaves Stingo and returns to Nathan. In both cases, the choice expresses victimization and how, in the victim’s mind, the distinction between perpetrator and victim can be blurred. Sophie is hounded by the guilt she feels regarding her children’s fate, but the fact is she was the pawn of a Nazi sadist, completely powerless to protect her children. In the second case, now the victim of domestic abuse, Sophie acts like any abused woman may act; she returns to her abuser, plunging toward destruction because she believes she is nothing without her abuser. Thus, she embraces her own destruction, having been long taunted by claims that she is unworthy of living.

      This confusion between abuser and victim is carried further in the characterization of the Nazi doctor, Fritz Jemand von Niemand, who forces Sophie to choose between her children. Von Niemand, the abuser, is characterized as a divided man, both dominant and vulnerable. He is attractive, young, and “silkily feminine.” Sophie admits, “If he had been a woman, he would have been a person I think I might have felt drawn to.” When the doctor meets Sophie he is “undergoing the crisis of his life: cracking apart like bamboo, disintegrating.” Before the war he was a churchgoer, and aspired to the ministry, but a money-hungry father forced him into medicine; this point constitutes coercion. Now a doctor, von Niemand knows himself part of “a mammoth killing machine,” as much a cog in the works as the slaves he chooses to labor for IG Farben. The hint of femininity suggests that perhaps he is a homosexual or has at least a tendency not to identify with the masculine military role—in either case, he may be terrified that he will be categorized among those hated groups selected for extermination. In this scene of unthinkable torture and pain, readers are asked to consider how the abuser may have himself been coerced, may himself be potentially a victim.

      In the final scenes in which Stingo pursues Sophie, sees her and Nathan curled in death, attends their double funeral, and grieves for his friends, the narrator directs readers to texts of lamentation. Stingo reads the Old Testament on the train as he returns to Brooklyn, the poem by Dickinson over the graves, and finally, recalls the few worthy sentences from his 1947 summer writings. The narrator focuses in the final couple pages on one sentence from that summer: “Let your love flow out on all living things.” This idea, admittedly “the property of God,” has “been intercepted—on the wing, so to speak—by such mediators as Lao-tzu, Jesus, Gautama Buddha and thousands of lesser prophets.” To feel this all-encompassing, impersonal love is to be able to grieve for human suffering. Compassion, rooted in awareness that all beings are united, allows a person to feel the interconnectedness of all human life. Evil encompasses all humans; the suffering it causes is for all of people to acknowledge. In so far as Stingo can realize his cultural connections to evil and his membership in the human family, he identifies with the suffering. The rage and sorrow demand that he mourn all “the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth.” This mourning enacts resurrection: Stingo dreams of death and awakens to morning.

      But is it enough to mourn for the effects of colossal evil? Sophie’s story is interrupted twice by Stingo’s departure—once for a weekend date with Leslie, once for a ten-day vacation with an old Marine buddy. These anticlimactic sexual scenarios may work in the text to illustrate how people can be aware of evil only to a degree, and then their own immediate interests or drives take them away from attending to it. Perhaps, in trying to comes to terms with the Holocaust and with the post–World War II responses by Americans to it, Styron suggests that, because people are separated from the site of atrocity and self-absorbed in their immediate circumstances, they lose track of evil, thus falling asleep to their participation in it.

Source: Melodie Monahan, Critical Essay on Sophie’s Choice, in Novels for Students, Thomson Gale, 2006.