william styron - sophie`s choice,ramona hosu

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„ PETRU MAIOR” UNIVERSITY TÂRGU MUREŞ

FACULTY OF SCIENCES AND LETTERS

ROMANIAN LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

ENGLISH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE

3rd YEAR, IFR

POSTWAR AMERICAN LITERATURE AND FILM

HAVING THE “PRIVILEGE” TO CHOOSE

Guided by:

Senior Lecturer Ramona Hosu

Elaborated by:

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HAVING THE “PRIVILEGE” TO CHOOSE

WILLIAM STYRON – SOPHIE’S CHOICE

SUMMARY

• Brief introduction in William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice

• Main characters and plot of the novel

• Quotations

• Analysis of major themes of the novel starting from the quotations

• Conclusion

• Bibliography

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William Styron, Sophie’s choice

“ You’re a Polack, not a Yid. That gives you a privilege, a choice.”

Her thought process dwindled, ceased. Then she felt her legs crumple. “I can’t choose!”

She began to scream. Oh, how she recalled her own screams! Tormented angels never screeched

so loudly above hell’s pandemonium. “Ich kann nicht wählen!” she screamed.

The doctor was aware of unwanted attention. “Shut up!” he ordered. “Hurry now and

choose. Choos, goddamit, or I’ll send them both over there. Quick!”1

........................

“Don’t make me choose,” she heard herself plead in a whisper, I can’t choose.”

“Send them both over there, then,” the doctor said to the aide, “nach links”.

“Mama!” She heard Eva’s thin but soaring cry at the instant that she thrust the child away

from her and rose from the concrete with a clumsy stumbling motion. “Take the baby!” she

called out. “Take my little girl!”2

..............................1 Styron, William, Sophie’s choice, Vintage Classics, 2004, page 5942 ibidem

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“She still had her mis – and her flute, “ Sophie said as she finished talking to me. “All

these years I have never been able to bear those words. Or bear to speak them, in any language.”3

The film, Sophie’s Choice directed by Alan J. Pakula CD 2 01.08’.40’’ – 01.12’.04’’

HAVING THE PRIVILEGE TO CHOOSE

WILLIAM STYRON – SOPHIE’S CHOICE

Published in 1979, Sophie’s Choice by William Styron, a novel wich explores evil in

many forms through the life of a Polish young woman befor, during and after the World War II,

became an immediate bestseller and the basis of a succesfull film. Winner of the National Book

Award in 1980, Sophie’s Choice is often considered Styron’s best work.

The narrator, Stingo, a young Southern writer, moves into a Brooklyn boarding house,

where he meets his upstairs neighbour, Sophie Zawistowska, a Polish survivor of the Nazi

concentration camp, and her lover, Nathan Landau, an American Jew with sever mental

problems. Stingo becames Sophie’s confidant, who eventually relates him all the atrocities she

had to endure during the war, especially when she was a prisoner in Auschwitz. Reading the

book we find out that Sophie had to make many difficult choices durind her stay in Auschwitz.

This novel explores evil in many forms: racism, sexism, substance abuse, domestic violence, and

wartime atrocities. It suggests that oppression is a source of evil – that the state of complete

domination achieved by the Third Reich evolved from the institution of slavery. It illustrates how

3 ibidem

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people try to save themselves from the widening vortex of hatred. For exemple, Sophie thinks

she is safe as long as the Germans focus on destroying the Jews.

Sophie speaks perfect German and French, being tought by her father, who was a

professor at the local university. As a young woman she works as her fathers secretary and

marries his protege, Kazik Zawistowska. They have two children, a son, Jan, and a doughter,

Eva. Sophie witnesses the arrest of her father and her husband, who are later killed in

Sachsenhausen. She mover with her two children in Warsaw, soon she is discovered to have

illegally hidden meat under her dress; she hoped to deliver the meat to her sick mother. She is

transported with her children to the concentration camp at Auschwitz. On arrival, on the

Auschwitz platform, standing before the Nazi doctor, who played God, by decideing who should

work and who should die, Sophie makes the mistake of catching the doctors attention. This is the

moment when the sadic Nazi doctor makes her take the most horrible decision of her life.

• Quotations: Styrone, William, Sophie’s choice, page 594,

• The film: Sophie’s Choice directed by Alan J. Pakula CD 2 01.08’.40’’ – 01.12’.04’’

Being a Polack she has a “privilege”, she has to choose which one of her two children

should live and which one should be sent to the gas chamber than the incinerator to die. She

refuses to make a decision until the officer threatens to take away both of her children. In that

desperate moment, she chooses her son instead of her daughter. There was no other posibility,

she had to choose one, or they both would have been killed. The horror of such a choice would

drive any parent to the brink of insanity – and perhaps beyond.

Her doughter, Eva, is a precious ten-years-old with exceptional talent in playing the flute.

Sophie could not consider raising Eva without giving her a knowledge of musik. Jan, her son,

walks his sister to her flute lesson in Warsaw and conforts her when she is cold and hungry.

Being put in front of the most horrible choice of her life, she chooses Eva to die and Jan to live,

an act that plagues Sophie for the rest of her life. Sophie believes she played a part in Eva’s

murder. Her construction of this memory illustrates how as a survivor internalizes responsability

for the abuse perpetrated by someone else. Instead of blaming her tormentor, she blames herself.

Feeling all this guilt, tourmenting her the fact that she was the one who said the words :

” Take my little girl”, doesn’t even have the certanty that Jan, her son survived in the Children’s

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Camp. His actual fate is unknown. Sophie is hounded by giult over the selection she was forced

to make between her children. Thus, she is unable to see that everyone on the platform has been

“choosen” by the Nazi to die and that she is unable to spare either of her children from this fate.

She insists that her children are “racially pure”, exploiting Nazi racism in a futile attempt

to protect her children. By revieling her racial belongniss she gaind the “privilege” to decide the

destiny of her children, a destiny that was already decided by the Nazis. She was so certain that

her perfect German knowledge and their racial pureness would be their salvation, that she didn’t

even tought about the posibility to remain dumb. The question is if her children would have had

another destiny if she would have remaind quite, not revieling her German knowledge. Starting

from the fact that everyone who was captured and sent to Auschwitz had already their destiny

decided, we can definitly assert that no other reaction of Sophie would have changed her

children’s destiny.

Does Sophie’s choice show less love towards her doughter? Was there any other “better”

choice she could have made? She made a choice under an extreme presure, she was urged by the

doctor to take a quick decision, without having any time to considere what would the right

choice be. But is there a right choice in this case? No parent could find the right answere, when

the question is which one of their child should die and which one should live.

Sophie had no right choice, she had to make a choice which would have been terrible in

both cases.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

PRIMARY SOURCES

1. Styron, William, Sophie’s Choice, Vintage Classics, 2004

SECONDARY SOURCES

1. Cartens, Lisa, Sexual Politics and Confessional Testimony in Sophie’s Choice;

www.questia.com

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2. Chametzky, Jules, Cultural Mediation in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers

3. Hadaller, David, Genocide:Women in the Novels of William Styron; www.questia.com

4. Vice, Sue, Holocaust fiction; www.questia.com

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william styron - sophie`s choice,ramona hosu

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