Sophie's Choice

A few weeks after Stingo settles into his new living arrangement, he receives a letter from his father. A family friend has recently died and left Stingo’s father his peanut farm. Having retired from farming 40 years earlier, Stingo’s father proposes that his son should manage the property instead. Stingo considers the proposition. He would no longer have to worry about a place to live and could get on with writing his novel. After giving the matter some thought, he decides to reject the offer.

As Stingo tells the reader, his reasons are threefold. First, inspiration has finally struck regarding a topic for his first book. He intends to write about the suicide of his first love, Maria Hunt. He says, “In my career as a writer I have always been attracted to morbid themes—suicide, rape, murder, military life, marriage, slavery. Even at that early time I knew my first work would be flavored by a certain morbidity” (118). Now that he has come up with a plot, Stingo writes the first 50 pages of his book.

His second reason for staying in New York is his newfound fascination with Sophie and Nathan. He says, “There in Brooklyn I had come to the point where I sorely needed friends, and I had found them, thus soothing my pent-up anxieties and allowing me to work” (121). His final reason for staying is the prospect of a sexual relationship with a girl named Leslie Lapidus. Stingo meets Leslie among the usual crowd at the beach where Sophie and Nathan like to go on Sundays. Leslie is a highly educated, freethinking young woman who has hinted that she might have sex with Stingo. He devotes a fair amount of time to fantasizing about their imaginary encounter even though Stingo is still infatuated with Sophie.

Sophie tells Stingo the story of her initial meeting with Nathan. After her fainting spell in the library, she wakes up in her own apartment with a concerned Nathan hovering by her side. He asks her innumerable questions about her health and dietary habits. At first, Sophie thinks he is a doctor until he insists on making an appointment with his brother, who is an actual doctor.

Nathan prepares a nourishing meal, and the two spend the evening listening to classical music on the radio. After a while, Sophie begins to talk about her time in a concentration camp. She was sent there for stealing a ham. Because Sophie’s mother was gravely ill, she thought meat might help her recover even though this food is forbidden to anyone except German soldiers. Sophie later finds out that her mother died several months after her arrest. At the end of this narrative, Nathan leaves so that Sophie can sleep.

The story continues from Stingo’s perspective as he gives more details of Sophie’s time in the camp. He believes that there are some events in her past that she can’t bear to tell Nathan. Stingo says, “I think that quite unbeknownst to herself she was questing for someone to serve in place of those religious confessors she had coldly renounced. I, Stingo, handily filled the bill” (159).

Sophie admits to Stingo that her main duty in the Auschwitz labor camp was to help with the incineration of the gassed Jewish corpses from nearby Birkenau. The commandant of Sophie’s camp is named Rudolf Höss. He is later tried for war crimes and executed. Stingo discusses Höss’ Nazi career at length and concludes that real evil isn’t theatrical or dramatic. It is committed by civilian bureaucrats like Höss instead. Stingo says, “Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians” (163).