著者

田中 久男

出版者

広島大学文学部

雑誌

広島大学文学部紀要 (ISSN:04375564)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.44, pp.p153-175, 1984-12

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Sophie's Choice (1979), William Styron's autobiographical novel, deals, like his other works, with the nature of evil in all mankind: "our proclivity toward hatred and toward massive domination," the grievous proclivity which was embodied on the largest scale in the despotic institutions of slavery and the concentration camps. This paper, though analyzing the obsessions of three main characters, as well as exploring the issue of the form of the first-person narration employed in this book, is primarily a study of its themes: the main characters' choices involving evil, their consequent ordeal of guilt, and the tricks or irony of fate coloring the whole of this novel.Structurally similar to Moby Dick, The Great Gatsby, and All the King's Men, Styron's Sophie's Choice comprises two stories—the initiation of a young novelist and Southern WASP, Stingo, and the ordeal of a Polish Catholic woman, Sophie, who suffers from her painful memory of "the Auschwitz experience"—though the story of Nathan, a paranoid schizophrenic New York Jewish liberal, is splendidly entangled with the stories of Sophie and Stingo.Thematically, the novel is intended to "radiate outwards" by using the awful moment of Sophie's choice in Auschwitz as a "metaphor": the ordeal of her self-hatred and sense of guilt echoes not only the ordeal of Stingo's guilt about his abandonmment of his mother and of Sophie and Nathan at the final moment, but the ordeal of Dr. Blackstock's grief and guilt toward his wife's death and that of Stingo's great-grandfather who chose to sell his black boy, Artiste, to a trader. The subject of the tricks or irony of fate is also meant to reverberate in the same way: Stingo, a descendant of the slave owners, receives his share of Artiste's sale, the tainted money which enables him to concentrate on his literary apprenticeship; Sophie's skill in typing and shorthand which she was compelled to learn by her tyrannical father helps her survive Auschwitz among a small elite; while her father, in spite of his idea of the extermination of Jews, becomes a victim of Nazi totalitarianism. Stingo has survived World War II, while Edward Farrell, also wanting to be a novelist, has died in the War, though both were almost simultaneously in Okinawa.At the end of the novel, Stingo (Styron) has become aware of "death, and pain, and loss, and the appalling enigma of human existence" universally inherent in the human condition, and is still aware of the glory of continuing a painful effort to plumb the depths of that enigma. Sophie's Choice is a splendid product of such an effort on the part of the author.