Chichester 1

Jen Chichester

Professor Franciosi

ENG 605

13 April 2015

Nathan’s Choice: Madness in the Aftermath of the Holocaust in Sophie’s Choice

All three main characters in William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice directly or

indirectly faces a deepened intermingling of grief and more pervasive mental health

issues, such as schizophrenia, depression, and the deadly symptom of suicidal ideation.

While Sophie’s option to commit suicide isn’t the only shocking choice she makes in the

novel, it is still astonishing for many readers that a Holocaust survivor commits suicide.

However, what is sadly not baffling is that Nathan Landau, an American Jew who was

unable to fight in World War II due his madness, also commits suicide. Nathan, who is

unable to reach a catharsis with his personal grief and sense of loss throughout his life,

expresses himself through extreme bouts of rage often followed by sorrowful repentance

for his actions without actually experiencing a therapeutic purging of emotions. His

diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia, which is compounded by drug use, has landed him

in mental institutions numerous times, thereby likely depriving Nathan of a solid sense of

self and autonomous self-reliance. However, while Nathan falsifies his identity in order

to appear impressive and important, he also acts as a moral agent for young Stingo,

whose naïveté is obliterated by the dual suicide of Sophie and Nathan. Nathan, like

Sophie, is a victim – a vicarious victim of the Holocaust and a direct victim of his own

insanity.
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Styron’s novels often deal with “the difficulty of overcoming grief which, if

unresolved, can lead to suicidal behavior or homicidal madness” (Sirlin 90). Sophie’s

Choice contains a moral fable which depicts how an overwhelming sense of suffering can

lead to mental health issues, including suicidal ideation, as evidenced in Nathan Landau

and Sophie Zawistowska. In the novel, neither Sophie nor Nathan achieves, as Sirlin calls

it, “the catharsis of grief.” Nathan in particular experiences a build-up of guilt, loss, rage,

and paranoia in lieu of his loss of identity and autonomy. His brother, Larry, exemplifies

Nathan’s ideal self – the self that Nathan cannot obtain due to his paranoid schizophrenia.

As Larry tells Stingo, Nathan has been in-and-out of mental institutions for much of his

life and lacks control over his emotions, especially his anger. Although it is tempting to

read Nathan as a detestable maniac, there is something that prevents some readers – and,

certainly, the important people in Nathan’s life – from fully loathing Nathan. Perhaps this

has something to do with Styron’s empathy as someone who endured his own share of

mental health issues.

In Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, Styron writes that “Loss in all of its

manifestations is the touchstone of depression – in the progress of the disease and, most

likely, its origin” (56). Loss is a key component of understanding Sophie, but it is also

imperative for understanding Nathan’s madness as well. While Nathan clearly suffers

from more than just depression, depression has a co-morbidity with schizophrenia. In

fact, studies show that about 10 percent of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia commit

suicide, and it is likely that many more experience suicidal ideation (Siris par.1). As

Styron suggests, loss can take on many forms. For Sophie, loss comes in the form of her

life in Poland. The entirety of her identity has shifted due to external forces. For Nathan,
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however, more internal (as well as some external – or, probably more accurately,

externalized) forces seem to be impacting his psyche. Sophie describes Nathan’s shifting

moods, relating that he experiences headaches during which he becomes “quiet,

melancholique even” (195). Nathan alternates between melancholy and mania infused

with drugs and paranoia. Allen Shepherd writes that Nathan’s violent outbursts are in part

results of “his repressed rage and utter hopelessness of ever successfully resisting or

competing with Larry” (608). Nathan has internalized Larry as his ideal self, yet Nathan

is unable to fulfill his own dreams of joining the paratroopers in World War II and

becoming a writer. This brings about a love-hate relationship between Nathan and Stingo,

an aspiring writer attempting to strike out on his own. Nathan seems to both love and hate

Stingo. He is the younger brother Nathan could’ve been to Larry; Stingo is also the

aspiring writer Nathan once was, yet Nathan’s aspirations seem to perpetually get

thwarted. Nathan hasn’t faced traumatic, tangible losses of family or friends to death like

Sophie. Instead, Nathan has lost a sense of wholeness, autonomy, and identity and has

had to reconstruct his own character. He has failed to stack up to his brother’s high profile

and, in facing that loss, makes up for it by lying about his professional status. Nathan,

who has been shut away for much of his life, has become “the narcissistic center of

attention whenever others are present” (Wyatt-Brown 65). This loss of identity leads to

irreconcilable grief in Nathan, which could potentially be leading to a co-morbidity of

depression with his paranoid schizophrenia.

Partial to grief and loss is the guilt that both Nathan and Sophie feel for their

respective choices and circumstances. While Sophie feels remorseful for her choice of

saving her son’s life over her daughter’s during the Holocaust, Nathan, as a Jewish-
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American who has been subjected to the traumatic experiences of mental institutions,

experiences guilt for not having been able to help fight in World War II. He identifies

with the victims of the Holocaust, which, as P.S. Greenspan explains, is a representation

of “an alternative way of exhibiting moral solidarity in response” to a situation (300).

Nathan is as much a victim as Sophie, though in a different way. This sense of guilt and

victimization is what leads Nathan further down his path of self-destruction, though he

possesses a sense of moral justness toward others who are disenfranchised and

persecuted. In one conversation with Stingo, Nathan exclaims that “[n]o Southerner

escapes responsibility” for the history of slavery in the southern states (72). Nathan, who

has been denied his perceived responsibility to serve in World War II most likely also

holds himself accountable in a similar way, though his fragmented, constructed sense of

identity often comes into conflict with his moral standings.

Both Nathan and Sophie are not upfront about their personal histories. Unlike

Sophie, who tends to omit important information, Nathan completely fabricates major

facets of his identity, much of which impacts the perceptions other characters have of

him. For example, Nathan is described by Morris Fink as “a golem” (60). Fink offers an

initial glimpse into Nathan’s violent side that is followed by expressions of grief and

remorse. Nathan never speaks of the “fear, frustration, rage, and humiliation” he has

experienced as a result of these prolonged incarcerations (Shepherd 607). While Nathan

fails to mention crucial information about his mental health issues and numerous

institutionalizations, Stingo picks up on Nathan’s fabricated self. Stingo notices that

“what emanated from him [Nathan] so drolly was the product of dazzling invention” (75).

Nathan, while being inauthentic and sometimes expressing large bouts of rage, has the
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ability to charm those who meet him. Nathan, who lacks a solid sense of identity, is also

one of the men in Sophie’s life who provides an identity for yet dominate over her, even

though Nathan himself is subjugated to his own schizophrenia, showing “that there is no

escaping victimization” (Lupack 190). Sophie might be a victim for Nathan, but Nathan,

with his fictitious identity, is a victim as well, which leads to their conjoined suicide.

Sophie and Nathan’s suicides reflect the fact that they are victims. According to

Sirlin, Nathan and Sophie’s “joint suicide makes total psychological sense; both are

unable to bear the burden of their knowledge and experience” and adds that the Holocaust

claims two more victims in a way that unites Gentile in Jew in death (qtd. in Lupack

179). Of course, readers are left to wonder if Sophie and Nathan could have made another

choice, one that would allow them to transcend their victimization. Whatever degree of

choice they have available, for Nathan and Sophie, release is perceivably achieved in

nothingness. Nathan must have Sophie or nothing at all, and Sophie is so embroiled in

her own grief and loss that suicide seems a viable option for escape. The voids in their

lives are preventing them from making other choices. Bertram Wyatt-Brown writes that

“depression and suicide, [are] traumas which often serve as a metaphor for the emptiness

of modern life and the disintegration of family integrity in America” and encircle Nathan,

Sophie, and Stingo in the U.S. in 1947. Stingo is the only one who does not commit

suicide, but he experiences depression over his losses. Nathan’s and Sophie’s familial

lives are also vacant, as evidenced by the few family and friends they had attending their

funeral; Sophie’s due to the Holocaust, Nathan’s due to their disassociation from his

mental health issues. In the end, there was no way for Stingo to uncover “precisely what

took place between Sophie and Nathan when she returned that Saturday to Brooklyn”
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(500). The “troublesome ‘ifs’” cannot be made fully concrete and understandable. All that

Stingo can conclude is that “Sophie and Nathan had fled faith” (508). Also, Stingo

reminds readers that just because the Holocaust is over, “absolute evil is never

extinguished from the world” (513). There will always be Sophies and Nathans, victims

of their circumstances who cannot see another way out of their suffering.

Nathan serves a twofold role in the plot of Sophie’s Choice. On one hand, he

represents a violent oppressor who is also a casualty of his own mental illness. Yet, on the

other hand, Nathan serves as a moral guide for Stingo. According to Allen Shepherd,

“Styron’s dual aim… was explicitly to make Landau a credible psychopath and,

implicitly, a credible moral agent” (604). Nathan’s death gives Stingo “a new perspective

on and at least partial comprehension of the Holocaust and its meaning for Americans.”

Young Stingo requires “a moral fable to give meaning to his and their loss.” The writing

of this story by Older Stingo is the completion of the moral fable.

It is pertinent to remember that Nathan saved Sophie from grave illness and faced

some similar traumas to Sophie. Nathan has spent much of his life institutions where he

lacked freedom, just as Sophie lacked freedom in the camp. He has also vicariously been

a victim of the Holocaust as an American Jew who was prevented by his family – due to

his mental health status – from joining World War II paratroopers. Nathan is not “vile or

redeemably evil” and is rational when not in a paranoid or manic cycle (Wyatt-Brown

66). He even provides useful criticism to budding author Stingo, who must, in time, fulfill

Nathan and Sophie’s moral fable and pass it along to his readers. Styron’s own depression

was, as Simon Thomas Walker writes, overcome through “a rapid process of awareness

whereby he came to see his life as something of irrevocable value despite all the pain he
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had endured,” which included the loss of his mother when Styron was 13 (158). Styron

was essential able to initiate a path to recovery; however, in Sophie’s Choice, Nathan and

Sophie, as moral agents in a parable, are unable to do the same. They must serve an

entirely different function so that their lives of suffering and resulting suicides are not in

vain.

Nathan’s choice is that of nothingness being preferable to the anguish of a

victimized life. Nathan’s psyche, enveloped within the contexts of mental illness and drug

abuse, does not permit him to make an alternative choice; nor does the fact that he, along

with Sophie, is a literary tool for constructing and completing a moral fable. Mental

illness has historically been a taboo subject, making its victims somehow socially

deviants, voiding them of their identities. Stingo’s reaction to Larry’s divulgence of

Nathan’s schizophrenia is not atypical for mid-1940’s Americans who never experienced

the innards of such a disorder. Styron writes that Nathan’s schizophrenia is not just “an

unspeakable condition possessed by poor devils raving in remote padded cells” (427).

Nathan becomes “the poor lunatic whom [Stingo] loved” yet, to those who had not

known Nathan, he could easily be perceived as “the instigator of the tragedy… with a

history of psychotic episodes” (508). Stingo’s “resurrection” and his ability to process the

grief of his losses, not just of Sophie and Nathan, but others whose tragic tales have

touched him (515). Sophie and Nathan were not able to properly grieve their losses for

various reasons, leading to their choice to commit suicide together. Stingo, the last man

standing, is the writer of the moral fable that teaches readers about the conflict between

and results of overwhelming suffering and making difficult choices in terms of both life

and death.
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Works Cited

Greenspan, P.S. "Subjective Guilt and Responsibility." Mind 101.402 (1992): 300. Web.

6 Mar. 2015.

Lupack, Barbara Tepa. Insanity as Redemption in Contemporary American Fiction:

Inmates Running the Asylum. Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1995.

156-202. Print.

Shepherd, Allen. "The Psychopath as Moral Agent in William Styron's "Sophie's

Choice"." Modern Fiction Studies 28.4 (1982): 604-11. Print.

Sirlin, Rhonda. "William Styron's "A Tidewater Morning": Disorder and Early

Sorrow." The Southern Literary Journal 28.1 (1995): 85-93. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/20078139>.

Siris, Samuel G. "Treating ‘depression’ in patients with schizophrenia." Current

Psychiatry 11.8 (2012). Web. 17 Mar. 2015.

<http://www.currentpsychiatry.com/articles/evidence-based-

reviews/article/treating-depression-in-patients-with-

schizophrenia/b1958964d942023d3c8ddc764a37674b.html>.

Styron, William. Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness. New York: Random House,

1990. Print.

Styron, William. Sophie's Choice. New York: Random House, 1976. Print.

Walker, Simon T. "Spinoza, Styron, and the Ethics of Healing." Bioethical Inquiry 11

(2014): 153-60. Web. 6 Mar. 2015.

Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. "William Styron's Sophie's Choice: Poland, the South, and the

Tragedy of Suicide." The Southern Literary Journal 34.1 (2001): 56-67. Web. 6
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Mar. 2015.