42 pages • 1 hour read
William StyronSophie's Choice
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
Stingo recounts his father’s visit to New York. The Southern gentleman farmer has difficulty understanding why anybody would want to live in the metropolis. He tries once more to lure his son back home. Stingo is acutely suffering the loss of Sophie and Nathan and tells his father a few facts about his unrequited love. Realizing that New York now holds nothing but loss, he agrees to go back to Virginia to run his father’s farm. When Stingo returns to Yetta’s house to pack his things, he finds Sophie there as well, gathering the last of her belongings. Stingo says, “I realize now that I arrived at a mysteriously decisive moment. Only ten minutes later she would already have collected her odds and ends and departed, and I surely would never have laid eyes on her again” (327).
Stingo immediately calls his father’s hotel and says he’s changed his mind about moving back home. Stingo and Sophie go to their favorite local bar, where she tells him the story of her encounter with Höss. Afterward, they walk back to Yetta’s. Feeling that he’s about to lose Sophie forever once she moves out, Stingo demands to know how Nathan could treat them both so badly. Before giving him the answer, Sophie asks Stingo to get her a bottle of whiskey. He complies, and she steels herself with alcohol before admitting that Nathan is a drug addict. He uses Benzedrine and cocaine, both of which can dramatically alter his behavior. She says, “It was never his fault. He always had this demon, this demon which appeared when he was in his tempêtes. It was the demon in control, Stingo” (335).
Sophie goes on to recount Nathan’s first abusive episode some months after they met. They go to a party hosted by one of his work colleagues where Sophie learns about Nathan’s addiction. He acts erratically all evening, especially after hearing a news broadcast announcing that Hermann Goring has committed suicide using a cyanide pill right before his scheduled execution. Everyone who heard the broadcast begins to speculate about the future of Jews after the Nuremberg trials are over. Someone suggests that there is no safe place left in the world for Jews. Nathan grows increasingly troubled as the conversation becomes more paranoid. He sends Sophie home while he continues to debate the topic with his Jewish friends.
The next morning, Nathan shows up to collect Sophie for a weekend getaway in Connecticut. He’s still high and behaves recklessly during the drive. At the hotel, Nathan produces two cyanide capsules, which he intends for both of them to take because he believes death is the only answer. Stingo says, “Sophie told me that night, that Nathan tried to take her life and then end his own in what has come to be known in the vernacular as a suicide pact” (336).
After a harrowing day and night during which Nathan is unrelentingly abusive, Sophie is finally able to get him to take Nembutal to calm down. As he sleeps, she flushes the cyanide down the toilet. She says to Stingo, “Don’t ask me, Stingo, don’t ask me why—after all this—I was still ready for Nathan to piss on me, rape me, stab me, beat me, blind me, do anything with me that he desired” (376). The following day, after the drugs wear off, Nathan is his usual loving self, and Sophie forgives him for all his atrocities.
Chapter 12 Summary
The morning after Sophie’s confession about Nathan’s addiction, both Sophie and Stingo are suffering from serious hangovers. They decide to spend the day at Jones Beach to shake off their headaches. After they arrive at the beach, Sophie confesses that she has had an epiphany and is happy to be rid of Nathan. She says:
I realized I was glad that Nathan left me like he done […] I was so completely dependent on him, you see, and that was not a healthy thing. I couldn’t move without him. I couldn’t make a simple little décision without thinking of Nathan first (382).
Sophie impulsively suggests that she and Stingo should take off their clothes and go swimming. While in the water, the two share an abortive sexual encounter that ends prematurely. Though Stingo is emotionally overwhelmed by the experience, Sophie seems unfazed and immediately begins to talk about other topics as they climb back up the beach. Stingo falls asleep but waken to realize that Sophie has gone back into the ocean to drown herself. He races to save her. Back on the beach, she coughs up seawater and says, “You should have let me drown, Stingo. No one is filled with such badness. No one! No one has such badness” (396).
After she recovers and calms down, Sophie talks about the years after her father and husband were executed. She mentions a young man in Cracow with whom she had an affair. His name was Jozef, and he was part of the Resistance movement known as the Home Army. He was killed by the Nazis, but his half-sister Wanda tries to recruit Sophie to join the resistance as well. Sophie objects that she has children to consider. Stingo now learns that Sophie had two children—a son named Jan and a daughter named Eva. He says, “And I came at last to discern the outlines of that ‘badness’ which had tracked her down remorselessly from Warsaw to Auschwitz and thence to these pleasant bourgeois streets of Brooklyn, pursuing her like a demon” (397).
After Sophie is arrested for stealing a ham, she finds herself in prison with Wanda simply because the latter is a known Resistance fighter who happens to live in the same building as Sophie. A short while later, both Jan and Eva are also taken into custody. All of them are transported by train to Auschwitz. When the group arrives at their destination, Wanda, Sophie, and Jan are designated to be kept alive as slave labor. Eight-year-old Eva is marked for death in the crematorium at Birkenau.
Chapters 11-12 Analysis
This segment highlights the theme of choices. Even though the novel is called Sophie’s Choice, there is more than one choice involved in her story and more than one character making all the choices. The section begins with Stingo being offered a choice. His father wants him to return home to run the farm, and he is on the verge of accepting that offer. Sophie’s return to Yetta’s house changes everything when Stingo decides to remain by her side.
The reader, no doubt, realizes that Stingo’s attachment to Sophie and Nathan is just as unhealthy as their attachment to each another, yet he makes that self-destructive choice anyway. In Chapter 12, Stingo saves Sophie from drowning. She has chosen to kill herself, and he has chosen to prevent that from happening. When viewed from the perspective of the end of the novel, Stingo’s choice was yet another mistake. Sophie makes a bad choice after she becomes aware of Nathan’s addiction. Knowing she’s in love with a drug addict might be unnerving enough, but Nathan then sexually abuses her and wants her to join him in a suicide pact. Despite her horrible experience in Connecticut with Nathan, Sophie chooses to forgive his aberrant behavior and stand by him.
Nathan, himself, also makes a choice in these chapters. He and his friends grow paranoid after listening to news about the Nuremberg trials. They have lost faith that Jews are safe anywhere in the world. This feeds Nathan’s schizophrenic paranoia to such a degree that he believes the only solution is death. Goring’s suicide via cyanide capsule gives him the idea of killing himself in this way too. Even though Sophie eventually persuades him not to commit suicide while in Connecticut, the damage has been done. Nathan has chosen death as his only solution, and he wants to take Sophie with him.
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