Sophie's Choice: Citations

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On Structure...

Robert Alter, "Styron's Stingo", Saturday Review, Vol 6 n°4, July 7, 1979, 42-3

The basic structure of the novel, then is an attempted movement from the periphery to the centre. Superficially, this involves geographical displacement... More essentially, the movement from the circumference is a moral and an imaginative one. What Stingo finds at te center, during this long mid-century moment of his initiation to adulthood, is a reality too obcene t be conceived by the mental equipment his comfortable boyhood has given him.

Styron's novelistic strategy for approaching the abysmal center of recent European history is a simplified version of oblique multiple narration Faulkner used to move gradually toward the core of racial blight of Southern history in Absalom, Absalom!

The three intertwined plots of SC - the events leading up to Sophie's choice, the Sophie-Nathan relationship, and the narrators own sexual comedy - are all hinged on the historical fact of Nazi infliction of mass suffering, and together they form the dramatic enactment of the perhaps most important single thematic issue in the novel: the contrast between American innocence (symbolized by Nathan and Stingo) and the European experience (symbolized by Sophie and Höss)

At first Stingo seems almist a type, the American innocent suffering in his "morbid and solitary period" as a "crazy hermit", lonely, claustrophobic, unaware of the consequences of love and death, experiencing only that certain "hollowness" of the seft encapsulated Styron character we've come to know so well.

 The structure of Sophie's Choice has a most intriguing effect as well. Styron offers two stories that are separate but interrelated. In the first narrative we may find Stingo a very uninteresting character whose love life is fumbling and sometimes intentionally laughable. Yet in this bildungsroman, Stingo's youthful priapic frustrations are meant to contrast with the exuberant full-hearted lovemaking of Nathan and Sophie. However ineffectual Stingo is, his trajectory is toward life and love. Yet the passions of Sophie and Nathan represent their temptation for death and the barrenness of the grave. These polarities may not be perfectly realized in Styron's art, but they provide a sturdy foundation for the whole work.

The novel's epigraphs fit Styron's theme. Rilke's reference to a child's death as something left in the "round mouth, like the choking core of a sweet apple", sets evil, like cyanide, in fruit, at the core of life and relates as well, perhaps to little Eva's death - the worst moment of evil, at the novel's core. Höss's daughter, Emmi, also springs to mind, since Sophie sees her as "fetus, yet fully grown" (490). In anonther epigraph, Malraux reference to a search for that essential region of the soul where absolute evil confronts brotherhood" captures Styron's idea of proximity of the best and the worst in mankind. Far from Auschwitz' being a separate world, SC suggests that the evil that allowed it is embedded in seemingly diverse but familiar realities, much as Styron's theme is embedded in the novel like a "choking core".

"Call me Stingo", the narrator of SC starts out, parodying John Wayne ("Call me Ringo"), parodying Melville ("Call me Ishmael"). This opening note carries through much of the novel, which is by turns a parody of the Southern novel, as written by Faulkner, Warren and Styron himself; the American Jewish novel, as written by Roth, Malamud and others; the novel of Sexual initiation, written by just everybody under the sun; and even - such being the state of American letters - the novel of the Holocaust.