A Study Guide for William Styron's "Sophie's Choice"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for William Styron's "Sophie's Choice," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 14, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535833813

Book preview

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Sophie's Choice

William Styron

1979

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.

Author Biography

William Styron was born June 11, 1925, in Newport News, Virginia. He attended a private Christian school and Davidson College in North Carolina before graduating with a bachelor’s degree from Duke University in 1947. Like Stingo in Sophie’s Choice, Styron experienced the death of his mother when he was a teenager, and after college, began his professional life as an assistant editor for McGraw-Hill in New York City. Styron later served in an editorial capacity for the journals Paris Review and American Scholar. He also served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II and the Korean War.

Often compared to Faulkner, William