Choice,Trauma,Choice:an Interpretation Of Sophie’s Choice

Sophie’s Choice, which was published in1979and won American Book Award for Fiction in1980, is one of the masterpieces written by the gifted American writer William Styron. Up to now, domestic and overseas critics have studied the themes, the language and the narrative techniques of the novel while some of the researchers have attempted to analyze it from a historical perspective since it depicts a significant historical event, the Holocaust. This thesis endeavors to interpret Sophie’s tragedy in light of psychological trauma. By employing trauma theory as the theoretical basis, the thesis analyzes traumatic events in Sophie’s life, her posttraumatic syndrome, impacts of her psychological trauma and her failure to recover from trauma.According to trauma theory, seriously traumatized individuals may develop PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorders) such as reexperiencing, avoidance and numbing, shattered sense of self and loss of belief. People with psychological trauma can recover by establishing safety, telling traumatic stories and reconnecting with others.The protagonist Sophie Zawistowska is a Holocaust survivor who has both witnessed and suffered from a series of Nazi atrocities. She soon develops posttraumatic stress disorders: the assault on the subway train, the Nazi-looking librarian, the picture of the Auschwitz commander Rudolf Hoss in the magazine, the news about the execution of the Nazis and Nathan’s frequent interrogation about her survival all trigger her traumatic memories and make her reexperience her trauma painfully; she takes great pains to avoid anything that is related to her traumatic past by rejecting using the word "Auschwitz", ignoring news about the Nuremberg trials, concealing her daughter Eva’s death till the last few hours of her life and resorting to heavy drinking to anesthetize herself and escape from the painful traumatic memories for a while; her sense of self is so shattered by traumatic events that she once finds she cannot tell what she is; when she is forced to choose one of her children to live while the other to die, when she fails to finish her prayers with her favorite music which gives her hope, when she discovers God’s name is put together with that of Hitler, she feels that God has abandoned her forever and loses her belief in God. The psychological trauma, which has changed her life cruelly and completely, exerts huge impacts on her:she is always haunted by the feeling of extreme helplessness, thus she has a selfless dependence on her boyfriend Nathan; she is so constantly depressed that she attempts to commit suicide for several times; she feels guilty for her survival and all the wrongdoings she has been forced to do, so she is convinced that she deserves all the punishments imposed on her and she even tries to kill herself to shake off the sense of guilt.Sophie endeavors to establish a sense of safety by regaining her physical health, establishing a safe living situation and ensuring herself financial security, but she is confronted with a hostile environment, which leads to her failure to establish safety. She also tells her traumatic stories to Stingo, nevertheless, she tells them incompletely and she fails to reconstruct her traumatic stories and thus they cannot be integrated into her normal consciousness. She depends on Nathan selflessly but he leads her to self-destruction. She makes friends with Stingo and tells him her traumatic stories while he remains a passive listener and does nothing to help her. Consequently, Sophie fails to recover from her psychological trauma. With a heart that has been turned into stone, she finds that she cannot move on any longer. Therefore, committing suicide to escape from the psychological torture is the ultimate choice she can make. Though she has physically survived the Nazi persecution, she is murdered by the Nazi evil finally.By depicting Sophie’s life and death, William Styron takes great pains to demonstrate Nazi evil and to remind people of the fact that absolute evil never extinguishes. Though it is so powerful and formidable, Styron still shows confidence in clearing it at the end of the novel. His hope of removing evil is also an appeal to human beings for conquering evil and creating a better world.