SOPHIE'S CHOICE

Novel by William Styron, 1979

Sophie's Choice is structured on the ungraspable principle puzzled over by George Steiner in his Language and Silence and referenced by the narrator of William Styron's novel: two orders of irreconcilable experience exist simultaneously, so that while some people are going about their daily and mundane business, others are suffering cataclysmic upheavals. It never fails to amaze Stingo that on that fateful April day in 1943, when Sophie was forced to make an evil choice between her children at the railroad station in Auschwitz, he was gorging on bananas in North Carolina in a last ditch effort to make weight for the Marines. The point is underscored not only by the repeated statements about this disparity of experience but, more dramatically, by the two very different stories that form the substance of the novel.

The first story is that of the randy 22-year-old would-be writer, recounted by his mature self at a distance of many years. This story focuses on two of the young Stingo's most feverish ambitions, to get laid and to write the Great American Novel; it frames the second story, that of Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish Catholic survivor of the concentration camps. Stingo provides the vehicle through which Sophie can gradually divulge her darkest secrets, since her Jewish lover, wrestling with his own demons, has proved himself to be a violently unpredictable recipient of her confidences. The full horror of her "choice" does not emerge until the final pages.

By being faithful to his youthful self's ambitions, and by distancing Sophie's story through the lens of those ambitions, the narrator tells a tale heavily centered on a callow young man. Not until well into the novel does the reader learn the details of Sophie's past, a rhetorical device that builds suspense and again reinforces the unsettling idea about disparate orders of experience. Sophie's frantic attempts to cope with her guilt, regain a semblance of normalcy and vitality, and start life anew exist in jarring juxtaposition to Stingo's equally frantic attempts to gain any experience at all. By having the stories intersect through Stingo's friendship with Sophie, Styron suggested that the two orders might well come, in fact must come, into some form of communication, imperfect though it might be.

Styron's controversial choice to concentrate so heavily in a Holocaust novel on Stingo's desire to lose his virginity serves several additional purposes. The novel is in great part a Künstlerroman, about the development of an artist, and therefore all aspects of the narrator's coming-of-age are relevant to his works as well as his life. The force of passion, sex, and love as life affirming drives plays a central role in the Styron canon as a whole, nowhere more importantly than in this novel, in which the urges toward destruction and self-destruction predominate. Stingo's sexual traumas also reflect the time in which the novel is set, when Freudian theories were on everyone's lips but sexual repressiveness reigned. Through Stingo's ridiculous encounters with Leslie Lapidus and Mary Alice Grimball, Styron provided comic relief from Sophie's sexual violations in the concentration camp and on the New York City subway; at the same time he pointed up the contrast between all those episodes and the liberating (and presumably instructional) sex that Stingo finally achieves with Sophie.

Other dual orders inform the novel. The home of the Auschwitz commandant is essentially cordoned off from the hellish activities taking place outside, with life proceeding for the Höss family on such a separate plane that it might as well be on a different planet. The style of the sections dealing with Stingo is hyperbolic, a mixture of pomposity, intensity, and insecurity befitting the subject, whereas Styron often reserved a matter-of-fact, understated vocabulary and tone for the scenes from Sophie's past, which set off the dreadfulness of those events. In these ways Styron melded style and content to greatest effect.

Styron's tactic of making the novel so heavily autobiographical, down to the thinly disguised listing of the Styron novels that Stingo will go on to publish, has appeared self-indulgent to some readers, but it does enhance the authority of the novel and implies that all people must acknowledge human degradation on a personal level if they are to be fully human themselves. Through the revelations about Sophie's past and Stingo's as well, and through the connections Styron drew between European history and the American South's legacy of slavery, Sophie's Choice highlights the choices that all individuals make and the guilt that they bear in consequence. The novel is of a piece with Styron's other works in advocating rebellion against any bureaucratic system that would reduce its inhabitants to ciphers. Sophie's Choice ultimately teaches that, like Stingo, we must all shed our self-protective innocence without succumbing to despair.

—Judith Ruderman