In The Absence Of God

William Styron (1925—) is generally recognized as one of the most accomplished and creative of all post-World WarⅡAmerican novelists. Though born in Virginia, and once regarded as the immediate heir of the Faulknerian tradition of Southern fiction, he does not confine himself to the matter of his Southern heritage and frequently turns his attention to national issues, foreign matters, the existential state of the modern people and the destiny of the whole mankind. With Sophie's Choice, Styron has taken on the most dangerous and vast subject among his works: Auschwitz—the Holocaust. Styron does not follow the traditional western way of writing history from the top down (e.g. critical historical figures) or in grand narrative strokes (e.g. grand historical scenes). He is instead more concerned with the submerged or marginalized histories of the unimportant persons, such as Sophie, a Polish Catholic Gentile, and the destructive impact of her past upon her later life.In the novel, Styron juxtaposes the historical with the fictional and melts history and reality as well as future together. Styron's unique way of dealing with history in fiction and the relationship between history and fiction coincides with that of new historicism. Hence, this thesis is an attempt to employ the theory of new historicism to analyze the novel and to assess Styron's aesthetic and thematic concerns.The argument of the thesis is that Styron's historical and textual consciousness render him almost the same as a new historicist and his novel Sophie's Choice lays emphasis on the marginalized and submerged history of an unimportant person Sophie, which bears witness to the nature of evil, the sense of guilt, and the difficulty of salvation in the absence of God in all human history.The thesis consists of five chapters. It starts with a general introduction to the object and the scope of the study, which includes a brief comment on William Styron, a plot summary of Sophie's Choice, the critical response to the novel and the theory of new historicism. Then follows the aim of the study. Scholars have either appraised or...