Sophie's Choice

Thesis Question: Is there any justification for those critics who say that the central figure should have been a Jew, not a Polish woman.

"In those days cheap apartments were almost impossible to find in Manhattan, so I had to move to Brooklyn". This is the opening line in the novel Sophie's Choice by William Styron. In addition to being the opening line, it is the way we are introduced to our narrator, Stingo. To begin this story, Stingo moves into an apartment in Brooklyn after leaving his job at a publishing house called McGraw-Hill, and begins to work on his own novel where his true passion lied. In this Brooklyn building, Stingo comes to know his upstairs neighbors Sophie Zawistowaska and her lover Nathan Landau. This relationship,
We have our character Sophie, a Polish-Catholic who has been detained in a concentration camp, and had family murdered, and has been in direct command of SS authority. Then we have Nathan. A Jewish man and lover of Sophie, and not a direct victim of concentration camps during the Holocaust. So, in speaking on the Holocaust, Nathan's claim to knowledge of suffering is really the misplaced suffering of another. Other than word of mouth, Nathan is completely ignorant to what Sophie and other prisoners of the concentration camps had endured. His only suffering is attributed to his mental illness of paranoid schizophrenia. Nathan is "given" this illness, suggested through Stryon's writing, by the ridiculous contradiction of fear of violent hatred and at the same time imposing suffering upon Sophie. This way of defining schizophrenia as a result of contradiction is brought about in a discussion overheard by Sophie involving Rudolph Hoss. In this discussion, he states that the policy of exterminating Jews and the Nazi development of a new form of society in which is reliant on the people they are attempting to wipe out is "giving us all