William Styron, who wrote Sophie's Choice, sought out other novels to appreciate an author's thematic and stylistic choices. One of the novels which Styron admired was Sound and Fury, by William Faulkner. Styron embraced some of Faulkner's approach to writing and this can be seen by juxtaposing both Sophie's Choice and Sound and Fury. Love and guilt are major topics which both novels share. These emotions are felt by humans everyday, but having too much of both of these elements can prove to be negative for the wellbeing of mankind.
Sophie, the main character in Sophie's Choice, must embrace the loss of her family-her parents, husband, and children-due to the Nazi party in Germany. In the final chapters of the novel, one of Sophie's most excruciating choices is revealed; she makes an emotional decision to select only one of her children to survive with her in the extermination camp, while her daughter Eva was sent to the crematorium. Sophie made many decisions to keep her family alive before they were sent to the camp, such as determining not to aid the rebels' cause, but the guilt she faces after this decision has sculpted her personality and she carried the remorse of her daughter's unfortunate death throughout the rest her life. Sophie expressed her feelings to Stingo about her daughter by saying, “it might even save me from the guilt I have felt over Eva. In some way I know I should feel no badness over something I done like that. I see that it was...beyond my control, but it is still so terrible to wake up these many mornings with a memory of that, having to live with it. When you add it to all the other bad things I done, it makes everything unbearable. Just unbearable (p 538).” Sophie has kept these feelings to herself a...
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...for her, just as Nathan prevented Sophie from being loved by Stingo.
To conclude, love and guilt are emotions that allow humans to change their personality, both negatively and positively. For Sophie and Quentin, guilt has consumed their every thought and the feeling of guilt was unescapable for them. Their only solution was to end their live in hopes of being free from their past. Stingo and Caddy feel different kinds of love-one is from a lover's prospective, the other from a mother's-but both types represent how love is endless, and is unbreakable. Because Styron admired Faulkner’s writing, he was able to capture similar emotions and character chemistry and create a beautifully written novel.
Works Cited
Faulkner, William. The Sound and Fury. Faulkner. New York: Modern Library, 1956. Print.
Styron, William. Sophie's Choice. New York: Random House, 1979. Print.
In researching testimony, I chose to write about Eva Kor’s experience during the Holocaust. Eva and her family were taken to Auschwitz II- Birkenau from a Ceheiu which was a Romania ghetto in the 1940’s. Eva’s story starts out in Port, Romania where she was born and raised with her family before the Holocaust. Eva’s family consisted of her twin sister Miriam,two older sisters Aliz and Edit, and her parents Alexander and Jaffa. The last time Eva saw her father and sisters were when they arrived in Auschwitz after exiting the train. Eva and Miriam were with their mother until a man asked if they were twins.Their mother said yes, after asking if that was a good thing and then they were taken away never to see her again. Once taken away, they were brought to a barrack for twins where they were kept for Mengele to conduct experimentations.
...rays three themes of love. First of all, the character of the Chauvelin exhibited a great love for his country, even if it meant dying for it. In addition, the type of family love resided between Marguerite and her brother, even though parting separate ways, where their love is described on page 45 as, “the same deep, intense love.” Lastly, Marguerite and Percy’s relationship showed the intimate love of another person, between a couple. Overall, this book renders the different types of love, which leaves the reader yearning to follow the character’s good examples. In-between the lines, this beautiful story weaves a charming picture of true love and what the consequences of such feelings may behold, either good or bad. Analyzing love may sound sappy, but in the long run, will help individuals personally decided which relationships to keep or liberate themselves from.
...ing identity to the point where it no longer exists. This identity can be lost through extreme devotion, new experience, and immense tragedy. Relationships with the most meaningful companions impact both main characters, Elie and Frederic. Due to the events they must encounter alongside loved ones, Elie and Frederic change completely, losing the identity that once existed. The most impactful events of any life are those that involve struggle and tragedy. Any tragic event that one encounters can significantly alter the purpose of life forever. Tragic events such as taking away what one may hold dearest, such as a loved one in the cases of Elie and Frederic. This type of loss can create a saddened, purposeless life in all humans.
Firstly, despite having to live a weary, careful life, John and Mary Wender never resent their deviant child, Sophie. Like everyone in Waknuk, they knew the consequences of harboring a mutant. They knew how careful and alert they would have to be to raise a deviant child. Considering the extreme measures that the Waknuk people underwent to keep their society ‘pure’, the Wenders must have gone to extraordinary lengths to protect their daughter. The novel states that Sophie and her parents lived apart from the rest of Waknuk. They would have had to do this to hide the child from suspicious eyes. Their remote location, however, was not enough to ease their worries, as they lived prepared for the day they would have to flee. Although they were constantly on anxious guard for any who might discover Sophie’s mutation, the stress was not enough to make the parents unaffectionate towards their daughter; both Mr. and Mrs. Wender displayed love for their child in ways modern parents would. Mrs. Wender’s genuine concern when Sophie sprained her ankle and Mr. Wender’s warm response t...
Whether a person’s life is something experienced authentically, or factually written down as literature, there are more complexities faced then there are simplicities on a daily basis. This multifariousness causes constant bewilderment and hesitation before any sort of important decision a person must make in his or her life. When it comes to characters of the written words, as soon sensations of ambiguity, uncertainty, and paranoia form, the outlook and actions of these characters are what usually result in regrettable decisions and added anxiety for both that character as well as the reader. Examples of these themes affecting characters in the world of fiction are found in the novel The Crying of Lot 49 by Thomas Pynchon, and the play Glengarry Glen Ross written by David Mamet. Throughout both of these texts, characters such as Oedipa Maas who allows these emotions to guide her in her journey of self discovery, and Shelly Levene who is so overcome with these emotions that they become his downfall. For both of these characters, these constant emotional themes are what guide their most impulsive actions, which can generally also become regrettable decisions. Even though it is a distinguishing factor of human beings, when these characters are portrayed in print, it somehow seems to affect the reader more, because they are able to see the fictional repercussions, and also know how they could have been avoided.
Guilt is a feeling of responsibility or remorse for some offense, crime, wrong, whether real or imagined. There are different types of guilt. Guilt can be caused by a physical thing a person did that he isn’t proud of, or wanted to hide, can be something a person imagined he did to someone or something else, or can be caused when a person did something to his God or religion. Everyone at some time in his or her life has a run in with guilt, and it has a different impact on each person. People, who are feeling guilty because of something they did or said, can influence how other people act and feel. Some people are affected worse by guilt than others, for example, Dimmesdale from The Scarlet Letter. Talked about in The Scarlet Letter, Dimmesdale, a man with the deepest guilt, was responsible for the moral well-being of his people. He went against his teachings, committed adultery, and left the woman to suffer publicly alone while he stayed like a hero in the town. On the other hand, sometimes the masses are affected by one person’s guilt. He was affected much more by guilt, because he didn’t tell anyone of what he had done. By keeping guilt internalized, a person ultimately ends up hurting himself. More than seventy percent of all things that make people feel guilty are found out later on in their life by other people. Guilt has three categories that it affects the most in people: physical, mental, and spiritual.
...and through an unfolding of events display to the reader how their childhoods and families past actions unquestionably, leads to their stance at the end of the novel.
Looking back on the death of Larissa’s son, Zebedee Breeze, Lorraine examines Larissa’s response to the passing of her child. Lorraine says, “I never saw her cry that day or any other. She never mentioned her sons.” (Senior 311). This statement from Lorraine shows how even though Larissa was devastated by the news of her son’s passing, she had to keep going. Women in Larissa’s position did not have the luxury of stopping everything to grieve. While someone in Lorraine’s position could take time to grieve and recover from the loss of a loved one, Larissa was expected to keep working despite the grief she felt. One of the saddest things about Zebedee’s passing, was that Larissa had to leave him and was not able to stay with her family because she had to take care of other families. Not only did Larissa have the strength to move on and keep working after her son’s passing, Larissa and other women like her also had no choice but to leave their families in order to find a way to support them. As a child, Lorraine did not understand the strength Larissa must have had to leave her family to take care of someone else’s
The mid 19th century slavery setting of Beloved acts as a perfect breeding ground for tragedy and justifies the fragmented nature of individual's lives. The characters of Beloved are, in a way, defined by their foibles and insecurities. Sethe, Paul D, and Denver must confront and cope with the realities of an unjust history and an out-of-order world. The central conflict of the novel forces each of these protagonists to directly resolve his or her personal inhibitions and grow into a more composed human being. Had the events linking Paul, Sethe and Denver together been any less painful, perhaps "A life. Could be"(57). Sethe's broken sentences, while hopeful, convey a sense of doubt, and only the shadows are holding hands at the carnival. As a rule, Sethe is reluctant to rely on the advice or assistance of others, placing immense trust in her own abilities. Accepting such responsibility is a fantastic burden indeed, as it not only ostracizes her from a community who view her attitude "uncalledfor pride"(162) but brings her a constant regret and gu...
from sympathy to fear within the readers. However, out of all the notions and events that
If Chantal tells the village, she may be making a choice that leads to the death of another villager. If she does not, the stranger will tell them she withheld the opportunity which will put her at risk of being the chosen victim. In her moment of fear, she says, “For that moment, all of our fears suddenly surface: the fear of setting off along a road heading who knows where, the fear of a life full or new challenges, the fear of losing forever everything” (Coelho). On the other hand, Sophie is faced with two fatal choices, one being which child is most likely to live and which will surely die. Another choice she must make after a long life of agony after losing her family is the fatal choice to take her own life as she constantly has flashbacks of the guard demanding, “Make a choice, Or I’ll send both of them over there” (Pakula
"In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn". This is the opening line in the novel Sophie's Choice by William Styron. In addition to being the opening line, it is the way we are introduced to our narrator, Stingo. To begin this story, Stingo moves into an apartment in Brooklyn after leaving his job at a publishing house called McGraw-Hill, and begins to work on his own novel where his true passion lied. In this Brooklyn building, Stingo comes to know his upstairs neighbors Sophie Zawistowaska and her lover Nathan Landau. This relationship, we come to find, is tainted by Nathan's violence and jealous ways. Stingo quickly develops an infatuation with Sophie, who becomes our main character. As we read about her we learn a lot about her past and why she is who she is during the length of the novel.
Having inherited the myth of ugliness and unworthiness, the characters throughout the story, with the exception of the MacTeer family, will not only allow this to happen, but will instill this in their children to be passed on to the next generation. Beauty precedes love, the grownups seem to say, and only a few possess beauty, so they remain unloved and unworthy. Throughout the novel, the convictions of sons and daughters are the same as their fathers and mothers. Their failures and accomplishments are transferred to their children and to future generations.
...e characters and made them act based on their passion. However, it was also love that destroyed and created cruelty. Happiness is a choice and so is love. The purest kind of love can inflict the greatest pain in the world just like how Heathcliff and Catherine's love was, so close yet so far.
Her story, which starts in Nazi Germany, describes the journey of Sophie as she is forced to move from one country to another and in the process, loses many people she loves and moves on to form new relationships; Berlin proves that one can find home anywhere. However, for me, Berlin reminded me that there is a difference between empathy and sympathy. Empathy is the ability to understand other people’s feelings as if we had them ourselves; contrastingly, sympathy refers to the ability to take part in someone else’s feelings, mostly by feeling sorrowful about their misfortune. For most, people find themselves at home when they are surrounded by empathic individuals, those who attempt to understand and relate to their emotions and