42 pages • 1 hour read
William StyronSophie's Choice
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1979A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 1-3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Stingo is a 22-year-old transplanted Southerner who has come to make his fortune in New York in 1947, having survived a stint in the Marine Corps during World War II. He has ambitions to become a writer of literary fiction. Toward that end, he has taken a job as a junior editor at the McGraw-Hill Publishing Company. During the post-war years, McGraw-Hill specializes in technical manuals and nonfiction, so Stingo is generally forced to read substandard fiction manuscripts. His youth and arrogance combine to make him write scathing critiques of these works. In retrospect, Stingo thinks to himself, “Oh, clever, supercilious young man! How I gloated and chuckled as I eviscerated these helpless, underprivileged, subliterary lambkins” (6).
Stingo is paid a pittance, which forces him to take a bleak apartment and subsist on meager rations. Months of thankless toil leave him demoralized and unable to write. When a new editor-in-chief, whom he nicknames “the Weasel” (17), tells Stingo that he doesn’t fit the profile of a McGraw-Hill editor, the young man quits. Before he leaves, Stingo says goodbye to a fellow employee, named Farrell, who befriended him. Farrell tearfully recounts the death of his own son during the war. The boy’s life bears an eerie parallel to Stingo’s own because Farrell’s son also wanted to be a writer before his life was cut short. Farrell’s final words of advice to Stingo are to “write your guts out.” (26).
Chapter 2 Summary
After quitting his job, Stingo has very little money left. As he considers what to do with his life, he receives a letter from his father that offers a solution. Stingo is the descendant of a family of Southern antebellum slaveholders. His great-grandfather sold a slave and hid the proceeds somewhere on his property so that the Yankees wouldn’t find it. Nearly a century later, Stingo’s father unearths the money, which was promised to the children of the family. Stingo’s share comes to $500. Although he feels terrible guilt at taking money from the sale of a slave, the cash will allow him to spend a few months working on his writing without having to seek a job.
Stingo finds a room in a house in Brooklyn owned by a Mrs. Yetta Zimmerman. The entire interior of the house is painted in Navy Surplus pink. Yetta tells Stingo that she has very few rules for her tenants. They are allowed companions of the opposite sex as long as they’re discrete in their love affairs. Besides Stingo, there are six renters living in the building. Most live upstairs, but Stingo is assigned a room on the first floor. During his first night, he is disturbed by the couple above him, who engage in loud lovemaking followed by an equally loud argument.
The next day, Stingo meets a tenant named Morris Fink, who informs him that the noisy pair are Nathan, a biologist, and Sophie, an immigrant receptionist. Over the next few days, Stingo becomes intrigued by the antics of Nathan and Sophie. He finally catches a glimpse of them having an argument late one evening as Stingo returns from a walk. Nathan is a volatile, handsome Jew, and Sophie is a beautiful, fragile concentration camp survivor.
Stingo accidentally walks into the middle of their fight, during which Nathan threatens to leave Sophie because she’s cheating on him. She denies this and begs him to stay. Nathan turns on Stingo and insults his Southern accent before storming off, leaving a distraught Sophie crying on the porch. Stingo offers her his handkerchief and watches her walk despondently up to her room. He’s already begun to fall in love with her. Later that night, Stingo wakes from a disturbing dream and says:
Then again I fell asleep, only to wake with a start just before dawn, in the dead silence of the hour, with pounding heart and an icy chill staring straight up at my ceiling above which Sophie slept, understanding with a dreamer’s fierce clarity that she was doomed (57).
Chapter 3 Summary
The following morning, Nathan and Sophie come knocking on Stingo’s door to invite him to spend the day at Coney Island with them. Stingo thinks they’re both slightly crazy. He resents Nathan’s slurs about his Southern upbringing, but Nathan contritely apologizes. Stingo grudgingly agrees to meet them later in Sophie’s apartment for a snack before they set off.
On the way upstairs, Stingo encounters Fink, who confides that he thinks Nathan is like the mythical Jewish golem. Fink says of the golem, “He’s made out of clay or some kind of shit like that, only he looks like a human. Anyway, you can’t control him. I mean, sometimes he acts normal […] But deep down he’s a runaway fuckin’ monster” (63). Fink warns Stingo that Nathan is a monster too.
When Stingo arrives in Sophie’s apartment, he’s struck by the 1930s outfits that Nathan and Sophie are wearing. Nathan explains that they like to wear costumes when they spend Sundays at Coney Island because Sophie thinks people dress too drably. Stingo is enchanted by their harmless affectation. The three share a snack and some beer. Conversation is light and friendly until Nathan turns mean and begins haranguing Stingo about Southern racism.
Sophie intervenes and steers Nathan away from dangerous topics. They then go to the subway for their trip to Coney Island. Because of his loneliness, Stingo is vulnerable to the spell Sophie and Nathan cast over him. With a sense of foreboding of some evil yet to come, Stingo says, “I allowed myself to plunge on toward Coney Island, thus making sure to help fulfill Sophie’s prophecy about the three of us: that we would become ‘the best of friends’” (83).
Chapters 1-3 Analysis
The first segment of the novel offers an introduction to the three principal characters and sets up the tight dynamic that will prevail among the three. Stingo is the innocent. He is a newcomer on many levels. He is young, a Southern rural transplant to the big city, and just embarking on a career as a writer. Without any warning, he finds himself enmeshed in the ongoing drama between Nathan and Sophie. On his first night in Yetta’s house, Stingo overhears the two defining characteristics of Nathan and Sophie’s relationship: They share a fierce session of lovemaking followed by an equally fierce quarrel.
Stingo gets his first glimpse of the couple’s pattern of animosity and placation when he accidentally walks into a quarrel between the two the following night. Nathan’s accusations of infidelity will become all too common over the course of the novel, but this is the first time that Stingo is exposed to the older man’s paranoid delusions. For her part, Sophie strikes a conciliatory tone with Nathan and seeks to soothe him. This also is a tactic she will employ repeatedly over the course of the novel. Once Nathan storms off (yet another tactic he will employ in the future), Sophie lapses into tears. Stingo immediately offers to comfort her. He is attracted to her beauty and intrigued by her sadness. These twin lures serve to draw Stingo deeply into the ongoing tragedy that is Sophie and Nathan’s relationship.
To a lesser degree, these chapters also introduce the theme of language arts because Stingo aspires to become a writer. He gleefully tells the reader about his hypercritical judgment of other fledgling novelists, as well as the dreariness of being a junior editor. Stingo longs to write epic stories. He doesn’t yet realize that a tale of tragic dimensions is unfolding right before his eyes.
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By William Styron
