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 15-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 15 Summary
In the wake of Nathan’s threat, Sophie and Stingo hurriedly pack and board a train for Washington, D.C., where they will get connecting transportation to Stingo’s father’s farm in Virginia. As they travel, Sophie talks about her future. She says that once the two of them are settled, she wants to write about Auschwitz and tell the truth about what a horrible person she is. Sophie blames herself for all the things she did wrong and calls herself a “filthy collaboratrice” (497) because all her actions were attempts to save herself. Stingo tries to reason with her by saying, “You told me yourself that you just couldn’t judge what you did or what anyone else did in terms of accepted conduct. […] You’re just eating your guts out about things that weren’t your fault” (497).
When they arrive in Washington, they spend the night at a hotel. Stingo reaches Larry, who agrees to track down Nathan and deal with him. With Larry taking charge of the situation back in New York, both Sophie and Stingo relax enough to get some rest before the next leg of their journey. While at the hotel, Stingo proposes marriage to Sophie once they get to Virginia. Sophie points out the difference in their ages but doesn’t say no.
She then decides to tell Stingo the part of her story that she’s told no one else. After the hellish railroad trip to Auschwitz with her two children and Wanda, Sophie is confronted by a doctor who decides which detainees are fit for work and which will be sent to the gas chamber. The doctor tells Sophie that only one of her children will be spared, and she must make the choice. In an agony of indecision, Sophie is ultimately forced to sacrifice the life of her daughter to save her son.
Stingo speculates about the reason why the doctor would force her to make this cruel choice. He believes the doctor was trying to reawaken his own conscience and faith in God by committing a terrible sin. Stingo says, “Was it not supremely simple, then, to restore his belief in God, and at the same time to affirm his human capacity for evil, by committing the most intolerable sin that he was able to conceive?” (532).
Chapter 16 Summary
The next day, Stingo and Sophie see the sights of Washington before continuing their journey the following morning. Despite Sophie’s hesitation, Stingo paints a pleasant picture of their future life together. In retrospect, he says, “There had been an ingredient of escapism in my trying so doggedly to lay out the attractions of this garden of terrestrial happiness hard by the Dismal Swamp” (537). Sophie begins talking about Jan again. She wonders whether he was ever transferred out of Auschwitz and asks, “Is it best to know about a child’s death, even one so horrible, or to know that the child lives but that you will never, never see him again? I don’t know either for sure” (539).
That night, Stingo finally attains his dream when Sophie invites him to make love. After an orgiastic series of sexual experiences, Stingo wakens the next morning to find Sophie gone. She leaves him a goodbye note saying that she’s returned to Nathan. Angry and jealous, Stingo decides to continue his journey south without her. He gets no farther than Maryland before a premonition of tragedy forces him to head back to New York. Stingo says, “My subconscious had forbidden me to foresee […] that something terrible was going to happen to her, and to Nathan, and that my desperate journey to Brooklyn could in no way alter the fate they had embraced” (550-51).
When Stingo arrives back at Yetta’s, he sees police cars and an ambulance outside the building. Rushing upstairs, he’s confronted by the sight of Sophie and Nathan dead. They’ve both taken cyanide capsules. He describes the scene:
Dressed thus, but recumbent and entwined in each other’s arms, they appeared from where I stood as peaceful as two lovers who had gaily costumed themselves for an afternoon stroll, but on impulse had decided to lie down and nap […] and were frozen in this grave and tender embrace forever (553).
Numb with shock, Stingo goes through the motions of helping Larry arrange their funeral. Afterward, he travels to Coney Island and spends the night alone on the beach. Finally giving way to his grief, Stingo cries uncontrollably and says, “It was also a letting go of rage and sorrow for the many others who during these past months had battered at my mind and now demanded my mourning […] the beaten and butchered and betrayed and martyred children of the earth” (562). Stingo awakens the next morning to the sound of children playing in the sand. Much to his surprise, he has moved past his grief and notices that the day is bright and sunny.
Chapters 15-16 Analysis
The final segment of the book intensifies its focus on the theme of choice. In a pivotal moment, Sophie finally reveals the chief reason for her self-loathing. All her earlier confessions to Stingo have built up to the moment when she is ready to face the most devastating incident from her past and allows Stingo to see it as well. Sophie talks about the day when she is forced to choose which of her two children will live and which will die. It is an impossible decision to make, and Sophie would be bound to suffer a lifetime of guilt no matter which child she chose. Even though this decision offers no true choice at all, Sophie still feels guilty for making the selection.
Of far greater importance is the Nazi doctor’s willingness to allow her that choice. It was entirely up to him how prisoners would be processed. Stingo suggests that the doctor was attempting to precipitate a moral crisis of his own by offering this diabolical choice to Sophie. He wanted to reawaken his own conscience by performing an act of the direst cruelty. The entire episode speaks to the soul-killing potential of the Holocaust. While it destroyed the bodies of millions, it also destroyed the spirits of those charged with feeding the gas chambers and building the incinerators.
Sophie’s choice to sacrifice her daughter creates the self-loathing that inevitably leads to her destructive relationship with Nathan. In staying with him despite all his abuse, Sophie is implicitly choosing death. That this death is a free choice becomes apparent when she abandons Stingo on their way to Virginia. Sophie is under no constraint to return to Nathan. A new life is prepared and waiting for her in the South, but she is psychologically unprepared to accept a happy ending for herself. Stingo makes his most acute observation about the dynamic that leads to Sophie’s suicide pact with Nathan when he says:
And I also began gradually to understand how the turmoil that was grinding them to pieces had double origins, deriving perhaps equally from the black and tormented underside of Nathan’s nature and from the unrelinquished reality of Sophie’s immediate past, trailing its horrible smoke—as if from the very chimneys of Auschwitz—of anguish, confusion, self-deception and, above all, guilt (203).
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By William Styron
