Styron, William 1925–: Critical Essay by Edith Milton

Sophie's Choice is an ambiguous, masterful, and enormously satisfying novel. It reconstructs Auschwitz, the ultimate system of falsehood organized, from the vantage point of the commandant's house, and perceives its litanies to human degradation through an appalling, ordinary focus of daily life. The extermination of the "undesirable" is measured in terms of their clothes piled in the laundry, and the stench of the smoke from the crematorium. Auschwitz is order imposed on quintessential chaos, making chaos efficient. (pp. 90-1)

The novel's credibility depends a great deal on Stingo's lack of it. I was rather nonplussed to find how many reviewers accepted the narrator as Styron himself, and Stingo as the exact replica of his youth. Styron and narrator, Stingo the fictional and Stingo the actual, do have identical histories. They write identical books and develop the same literary reputations. But this is no autobiography; and Styron's balance between fiction and fact is breathtaking. He moves from confession to invention, from deeply felt compassion to glibness, from wisdom to asininity, in the most brilliant display of pyrotechnics in the uses of a narrator since Byron's Don Juan. He is always ambiguous. The Stingo of the book is more naive, more jingoistic, than its writer could ever have been, and the pit of Stingo's stomach, a major character in itself, reacts with equal queasiness to lust, overeating, and outrage. In turn the narrator, the fictional adult looking back at the fiction of his own young years, is often slightly befuddled, divided from his own novel, making mistakes about what it means and where it is going. He tends to be too romantic about things; his earlier novels, his lost loves. Sometimes he seems to become the butt of his own narrative; and one certainly cannot believe completely everything he says.

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