ABSTRACT
Near the end of William Styron’s (1925-2006) novel Sophie’s Choice,1 the protagonist, a young southern American aspiring novelist named Stingo, flashes back to a moment of crisis that causes him to endure “a real wrench of despair” and “writhe inwardly,”2 and his “heart to fill with pity and dread.”3 He is coping with the end of a friendship turned brief affair with Sophie, a Polish Catholic survivor of Auschwitz whose experience in the camp and subsequent refuge in Brooklyn after the war is told through his twenty-something narrative voice. Sophie’s days in the concentration camp go by with “increasing dread and anxiety”4 culminating in an “anxiety-drenched day”5 in which she is forced to make a “choice” about the fate of her two children. Stingo’s crisis stems from the several narrative threads of the novel: hearing, internalizing, and telling Sophie’s story; dealing with his physical desire for Sophie as well as his friendship with her partner, the Jewish character Nathan, who also takes an increasing interest in Stingo’s novel, and completing the novel, in which he leads his characters “on their anxiety-sick funereal journey across the Virginia lowlands.”6 Stingo describes his dilemma in Kierkegaardian terms:
My novel of course was more than this, too, yet it was the vessel I have described, which is why I so cherished it as one cherishes the very tissues of one’s being. Still, I was quite vulnerable; fissures would appear in the armor I had wrapped around me, and there were moments when I was assaulted by Kierkegaardian dread.7
