A Critical Review Of Sophie’s Choice

1409 Words6 Pages
Sophie’s Choice is a novel written by William Styron. It is set in New York in 1947 in the beginning and is told by Stingo’s point of view. Stingo was once a McGraw-Hill assistant editor, and he was very cruel in writing his reviews. He eventually gets fired. He moves to a boarding house owned by Yetta Zimmerman, whose house is incredibly pink. He meets his fellow boarders and falls in love with one named Sophie, who is dating a man named Nathan. One thing I enjoyed about this section of the book was Stingo’s sense of humor and writing style. I found his talk about his lack of sex amusing and the description of Yetta’s house was oddly delightful. His feelings about his surroundings were always made apparent and I enjoyed reading about his times in the boarding house. One day Sophie and Nathan have a horrible fight and Stingo is there to witness it. The next day, surprisingly, they invite him to join them at Coney Island. Stingo finds it odd that this man who was once literally a monster to his girlfriend could transform so quickly from an abuser to a gentleman, but he disliked Nathan’s views of Southerners because Stingo himself was from the South. He actually compared the lynching of a man named Bobby Weed to the acts performed by the Nazi’s. He also learns that Sophie is in fact Polish, and Nathan is Jewish, and he often accuses her of being anti-Semitic when he is angry with her. She talks about her arrival to New York and meeting Nathan, who actually saved her from a verbal tirade at the Brooklyn Public Library, and he helped her become healthy again since she was once imprisoned at Auschwitz. When Nathan went to Coney Island, he meets a woman named Leslie Lapidus, who invites Stingo to sleep with her. She acted as if she was experienced in the art of sex but in reality, she had never slept with a man before and her brashness was all an act. Although Sophie
Open Document