In this novel, however, the actual historic violence of the Holocaust is used as narrative within the fictional account, both sensitizing and desensitizing the reader at once. Styron seems to intend this, partly as a didactic function, and also as apologia; he quotes Elie Weisel's analysis of how the meaning of the Holocaust is devalued in artistic product at the same time he attempts to address the issue. It produces the effect of literary fingernails on a blackboard.
Sophie is an overdetermined ultimate victim: of patriarchal society, of racist stereotyping, of female objecthood. All that is left to her is sexual oblivion and death delivered from an uber-male "savior" who turns predatory and fiendishly cruel when a paranoid schizophrenic episode occurs.
She is an unusual victim in that she is quite a guilty one. On the platform at Auschwitz, the Nazi officer performing the selections between work and crematory offers her the choice to "save" one of her two children from death; the other must go to the gas chamber. She chooses her daughter and keeps her son alive, a reverse completion of the sacrifice of Isaac. Where is God? the chorus sings.
She has so little identity left that she cannot choose martyrdom; or perhaps the life force in her drives her to survive no matter the cost. Styron compels every reader to cast himself in a revival of her play: what would your choice be, walking in her shoes?
And, having made the choice Sophie did, how could she/you/they all go on living after surviving the death camps, anyway?
Her delivery is accomplished by a lover sufficiently mad and sadistic to provide them both with an operatic love-death; an irony because the one transcendent path, music, was also denied her by the total entrapment of her circumstances.
But Sophie's story is only one of three in the novel. Stingo, the Southern-born narrator, has his own guilt he needs to expunge, an American version of geno-doom, slavery. His writing sojourn in New York is financed with recently discovered blood money from the sale of a family slave.
He becomes enthralled with Nathan, a madly brilliant and handsome Jew, and tangled in a love triangle with Sophie as their common object, a woman so beautiful she summons gaze and desire in most any man she meets, a modern Bathsheba/Suzanna.
He is a deeply funny narrator, until he isn't, tormented as he is with urgent sexual need and his attempts to bed a woman. His graphic descriptions and language of his sexual life, at first amusing, come to have their own repellent quality, a counterpoint to the abusive cruelty and downward spiral to death Sophie experiences with Nathan.
His fulfillment comes during a misguided flight attempt to "save" them both from Nathan's slimy power. Their sexual interlude has a disturbing wrongness about it; their escape to freedom was always doomed.
Isn't his "love" for Sophie really narcissistic homo-erotic yearning for Nathan? His monstrous creative gift feeds on and yearns for Nathan's attention, as he competes with Sophie. Nathan feeds on Stingo's artistic freedom, his need for attention, and his non-Jewish birth circumstance.
During his stay in a mad pink-painted boardinghouse, Stingo's stash of money is stolen. Styron doesn't tell us who took it - but probably Nathan, just to make Stingo more dependent and anxious.
Sophie's Choice is compelling reading. But I found it lurid, didactic, and obvious. The best writing in the novel, to me, are descriptions of and reactions to fine weather and music.
They ring with revelation of the power and nature of music, and make Sophie's tragedy profound in a way that none of the other misfortunes she suffers can do. Even the power of music can no longer sustain her life after the grotesque events she suffers in war.
I think this novel would have made a fine opera; it has a hyper real, naturalistic quality that fits American realist style as set for me by Theodore Dreiser.
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