Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice
by William Styron
read: 2014
Modern Library #96, Guardian 1000 Novels, National Book Award

I was going to write this post on the parallels between slavery and the Holocaust, but the Wiki page covers this pretty well: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sophie's_Choice_(novel)

One thing that stood out to me on reading Sophie's Choice was the attention narrator Stingo pays to names. Early on he describes how he got the nickname "Stingo" (a corruption of "Stinky" for less-than-stellar hygiene habits). An early benefactor "bore the jaunty name of Artiste." He describes Gundar Firkin as a name that "sound[s] odd or made-up." He loves the names of his fellow flatmates "for nothing other than their marvelous variety" before he even meets them. He notes that love interest Leslie Lapidus' name rhymes with "Ah, feed us."

There's something meta-fictional going on here, and I don't know that I've entirely pieced it together, but I think a lot of it is set up for the character who presents Sophie with the titular "choice": Fritz Jemand von Niemand. As a work of fiction, presumably all the characters names are fabricated, but von Niemand's is invented even within the context of the novel, chosen by Stingo "because it seems as good a name as any for an SS doctor." Stingo takes similar liberties inventing an elaborate backstory for von Niemand, and this backstory is integral to explaining how a human could do some of the things the Nazis did in the Holocaust. Ultimately, this story rings false to me, and I think it's supposed to ring false - but the alternative is an incomprehensible evil.