Sophie's Choice

“There was something subtly and inexplicably wrong, and had I been able to use a turn of phrase current some years later, I might have said that Yetta’s house gave off bad vibrations.” 

Stingo makes this observation shortly after moving into Yetta’s house. He has no basis for this perception yet. His premonition won’t be fulfilled until he returns to it as a crime scene on the night of Sophie and Nathan’s suicide. 

“But Sophie and Nathan had quite simply laid siege to my imagination.” 

Stingo offers this comment shortly after meeting the couple upstairs for the first time. He little realizes the hold both of them will have over his entire life, not simply his imagination. Twenty years after their deaths, they still exert a pull that compels Stingo to tell their story.

“A sudden light glowed in the lusterless eyes, his voice became conspiratorial. ‘You know what I think he is? A golem, that’s what. Some kind of a golem.’” 

Fink warns Stingo away from Nathan when he describes the latter as a golem. The reference comes from Jewish mythology, so Stingo doesn’t understand the context. Yet, the normally unimaginative Fink seems to have captured the essence of Nathan’s dangerous nature. 

“My joy flowed out from some source I had not known since I had come to New York months before, and thought I had abandoned forever—fellowship, familiarity, sweet times among friends.” 

Part of the reason why Stingo is so susceptible to the charms of Nathan and Sophie is that he’s lonely. After leaving the South, he’s made no new friends in New York. He clings to the dangerous pair long after he ought to flee for the sake of self-preservation. 

“I am a person who is too often weakly misguided by the external masquerade.” 

Stingo is willing to dismiss Nathan’s first abusive behavior toward Sophie as a temporary aberration. He wants desperately to believe in their romance. The alternative would mean that Stingo must distance himself from the duo, and he isn’t prepared to let them go just yet. 

“It […] possessed the resonances of complete, unfeigned terror: ‘Don’t... you...see...Sophie...we...are...dying! Dying!’ I shivered violently, as if someone had thrown open at my back in the dead of winter a portal on the Arctic wastes.”

Stingo overhears Nathan’s comment at an early stage in their relationship. These words foreshadow Nathan’s conclusion that the world isn’t a safe place. The only escape from terror is the preemptive strike of suicide. 

“She was feeling her way. In every sense of the word having experienced rebirth, she possessed some of the lassitude and, as a matter of fact, a great deal of the helplessness of a newborn child.” 

Stingo is describing Sophie’s return to physical health. To some extent, her awkwardness at life is also the result of the burden of guilt she carries. Nothing in her world feels right, externally or internally. 

“At twenty-two I felt myself to be hardly more than a skinny, six-foot-tall, one-hundred-and-fifty-pound exposed nerve with nothing very much to say.” 

Stingo is describing his sense of inadequacy as a writer. His raw nerve sensitivity will make it possible for him to capture Sophie and Nathan’s desperation in print. That sensitivity will also cause him to psychologically share their doom.

“While I had droned in the hive at McGraw-Hill there had been something sick, self-flagellating in my withdrawal from people into a world of fantasy and loneliness; on my own terms it was unnatural.”

Stingo views his early isolation as a perverse form of rebellion against his unpleasant job. He is, however, desperately in need of companionship. This makes him particularly vulnerable to the dangerous lure that Sophie and Nathan represent. 

“A fleeting moment in which the attractive and compelling in him seemed in absolute equipoise with the subtly and indefinably sinister.” 

Stingo is contemplating Nathan from a distance. Typically, Nathan is either charming or demonic by turns. The two sides of his nature never meet, requiring those who know him to choose one side or the other. Stingo seems to be having an epiphany about his friend’s double nature when he perceives a fusion of the two sides. 

“‘Those strange creepy people, all picking at their little...scabs,’ she had complained to me when Nathan was not around. ‘I hate this type of’—and here I thought she used a lovely gem of a phrase—‘unearned unhappiness!’” 

Sophie is complaining about the crowd of intellectuals who frequent the beach at Coney Island. Her harrowing experiences at Auschwitz dwarf their neurotic and baseless complaints. She has earned her unhappiness. They have not. 

“Nathan, whom she adored but whom even then (even then as she spoke to me) she had come to see as her savior, yes, but her destroyer as well.” 

Just as Stingo perceived Nathan as a combination of devil and angel in an earlier quote, Sophie also seems to perceive the same dichotomy in her lover. By the end of the book, the reader might ask if Nathan’s suicidal act of destruction is not also Sophie’s salvation. 

“It is more often than not the person one loves from whom one withholds the most searing truths about one’s self, if only out of the very human motive to spare groundless pain.” 

Sophie has told Nathan a series of little lies about her past to spare him pain. Because her regard for Stingo isn’t as great as her feelings for Nathan, she lets him glimpse more of the painful truths about her past. In making these small disclosures, Sophie gradually confronts the unpleasant facts she doesn’t want to admit to herself either.

“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.” 

Stingo is unlikely to judge Sophie harshly for her past behavior because he is infatuated with her. She feels the need to confess her past to someone, and a receptive audience is the best option. She already condemns herself so thoroughly that the idea of revealing her sins to a disapproving witness would be intolerable. 

“Twinges of conscience, even of remorse, attack him from time to time like the onset of some bizarre disease, and it is this frailty, the human response that stirs within the implacable and obedient robot, that helps make his memoirs so fascinating, so terrifying and educative.” 

Although Stingo is commenting on Höss, his observation applies equally to the Nazi doctor who offers Sophie her fatal choice. The doctor, too, is an obedient robot who is afflicted with twinges of conscience from time to time. He rebels from his robot state and seeks to reactivate God in his awareness by committing a terrible sin. 

“Real evil, the suffocating evil of Auschwitz—gloomy, monotonous, barren, boring—was perpetrated almost exclusively by civilians.” 

Stingo points out this contradiction between theatrical evil and the real thing. No one seems to consider that such an enormous offense as the Holocaust could be enacted by average citizens. They are so ordinary that they have abdicated all moral responsibility for their actions by saying that they were simply following orders. 

“How could I have failed to have the most helpless crush on such a generous, mind-and-life-enlarging mentor, pal, savior, sorcerer? Nathan was utterly, fatally glamorous.” 

Stingo seems to prefer his evil to possess some glamour. While castigating the dull, civilian monsters of Auschwitz, he is perfectly willing to be seduced by Nathan’s charisma. He fails to note that the result in both cases is destruction of the innocent. 

“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.” 

Although Stingo doesn’t yet know the circumstances that drive Sophie toward self-destruction, he is perceptive enough to recognize that her relationship with Nathan isn’t simply one of victim and abuser. The dance of death in which they engage requires two partners. 

“This was the constant, overwhelming reality of her father, a man who had exercised over his household, and especially Sophie, a tyrannical domination so inflexible yet so cunningly subtle that she was a grown woman, fully come of age, before she realized that she loathed him past all telling.” 

Sophie only recognizes her father’s destructive hold over her psyche as an adult. It never occurs to her that this pernicious influence might be the very reason that she can’t let go of her guilt over her children. She has been conditioned from childhood to see herself as a failure. 

“This guilt is something I cannot get rid of and I think I never will […] And because I never get rid of it, maybe that’s the worst thing the Germans left me with.” 

Sophie views the Germans as the source of her spiritual malaise. She freely admits that she had no control over what she became at Auschwitz, yet she holds the guilt of all those actions just the same. She doesn’t seem to consider her own participation in this shaming process by her failure to forgive herself. 

“Consider how intimately life and death are intertwined in Nature, which contains everywhere the seeds of our beatitude and our dissolution.” 

Nathan makes this observation while considering the poisonous and curative properties of nature. His entire relationship with Sophie can be reduced to the same observation. Life and death walk together hand in hand. Each is the savior and destroyer of the other.

“I have tended always to reassure myself through the flimsy excuse that Nathan was in the process of a furious, unalterable and predetermined plunge toward disaster—a plunge in which Sophie’s destiny was welded indissolubly to his own.” 

Stingo is excusing his own culpability in the deaths of his friends. If he had returned in time, he might have prevented them from committing suicide. He does, however, make the telling statement that their fates were conjoined. Sophie was not a victim, and Nathan was not her destroyer.

“I despise the idea of suffering being precious. In this war everyone suffers—Jews, Poles, Gypsies, Russians, Czechs, Yugoslavs, all the others. Everyone’s a victim.” 

Wanda makes this statement after one of her allies lays special claim to the “precious” suffering of the Jews. Styron strongly advocates the theory that the Holocaust wasn’t strictly aimed at the Jews but at all those Hitler deemed undesirable. This line in the book stirred up quite a controversy among its readers.