Sophie's Choice

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.

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.

Related Topics:
Nat Turner - The Confessions of Nat Turner

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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, slavs in general; particularly the Polish people of Europe and also gypsies, 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.

Related Topics:
Third Reich - Russia

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