William Styron

• his work (including Sophie’s Choice and The Confession of Nat Turner – about the fight between the black slave and his white master) has generated both praise and controversy over the past fifty years
• he tries to cope with the unresolved moral questions of our time
• in his fiction we can find his concern for history
• he was born on June 11^th 1925 in Virginia
• his father was a shipyard engineer who suffered from depression
• his mother passed away when he was only thirteen
• as a rebellious child, he was sent to a boy’s preparatory school
• he ended up at Duke university after moving from school to school – Bachelor of Arts
• in the World War II – in the Marine Corps
• after leaving the service, he moved to New York – there he started to write
• he still writes, publishes, edits and receive numerous awards for his contribution to American literature

Sophie’s Choice

It’s a story of three absolutely different people: STINGO – a young Southerner who tries to write his first novel; NATHAN – an American Jew about whom we gradually find out that he is drug-addicted and is not mentally all right; SOPHIE – a beautiful Polish woman who survived Auschwitz, the Polish Nazi death camp.

The action is shown in two levels which continually mingle together.

The first story is narrated by Stingo and this story makes a side-scene for Sophie’s narrating. She commemorates the pre-war and occupied Poland, her father who was an ardent anti-Semitist, her arresting and finally her imprisonment in the concentration camp Auschwitz. When there is a camp selection, she stands before a key choice – she has to make up her mind which one of her two children she will prefer and so which one she will condemn to a certain death in a gas chamber. Psychically exhausted, with a sense of guilt and with the cognition that even with Nathan she can’t overcome her past, she decides to commit a suicide together with Nathan.

There are many very interesting perceptions in this book which I would like to mention.

There are a few kinds of choice. The first choice: in Warszawa she denied committing the revolt against the Germans. The second choice: It’s the choice of fate – a terrible choice between life and death of Sophie’s children. The third choice: to live or to die – Sophie and Nathan chose the second variant. In the USA, Sophie tries to get rid of the sense of guilt, thinking of death camp and influence of fascism. Thoughtless she falls in love with classical music, sex and Nathan. Nathan helps her physically but she still can’t deal with her cruel past.

There is also a comparison of Nazism and slavery in this book. These two tragic epochs of our history seem to be quite different. Slavery used people for working, Nazism directly wanted to destroy complete groups of people. On the other hand, above all the black people were used as slaves. And there we can find a certain parallel. To the black people, in the same way as to the Jewish people the basic human rights were withheld. Another joint feature is the total incomprehensibility of both slavery and Nazism. To avoid repeating this, we should know about these terrible acts as much as we can.