William Styron

Form

Literary techniques

Two techniques Vonnegut pioneered were the use of choruses and the "plant-connect" analogies.

Vonnegut used the chorus "So it goes" every time a passage deals with death, dying or mortality, as a transitional phrase to another subject, as a reminder, and as comic relief. It is also used to explain the unexplained. There are about 106 "so it goes" anecdotes laced throughout the story.

The "plant-connect" analogies are probably best explained with an example. Vonnegut uses the phrase "radium dial" to describe both a Russian's face in the prisoners' camp, and Billy Pilgrim's father's watch in the utter darkness of the Carlsbad Caverns. This emphasizes a connection between the two. The Russian's face reminded him that the other people in the camp were human, and that moment of recognition is thus filled with hope for him. So it was with Billy's father's watch, a bastion of security and familiarity in an unfamiliar place.

Another literary technique used by Vonnegut is the metafiction device. The first chapter of the book is not about Billy Pilgrim, but a preface about how Vonnegut came to write Slaughterhouse-Five. Vonnegut apologizes for the fact that the novel is "so short and jumbled and jangled" and explains that this is because "there is nothing intelligent to say about a massacre." In a similar way to Mother Night, but much more extensively, Vonnegut plays with ideas of fiction and reality. The opening chapter's very first sentence claims that "All this happened, more or less," and during Billy Pilgrim's war experiences Vonnegut himself appears briefly, followed by the narrator's note: "That was I. That was me. That was the author of this book."

Vonnegut uses metafiction to an even greater degree in his more recent novel Timequake. In it, Vonnegut discusses an old version of the book and how improvements were made on the original.

Slaughterhouse-Five opens with Vonnegut criticizing his own work for about 20 pages, then explaining the beginning and end of the story. This is an unusual but effective technique, as the story is also written from a point of view "unstuck in time," jumping erratically within Billy's life. It encourages flexibility and resourcefulness in the reader, who must fill in many blanks and build a picture of Billy's life out of order, like a jigsaw puzzle. Vonnegut's work commonly contains such disorder.

Billy Pilgrim's life seems like a cyclone, in which his birth, youth, old age, and death are all thrown violently around by the central event, the destruction of Dresden. By giving his novel this structure, Vonnegut centers everything else the reader has learned on this horrible central event, which is the key to the book's theme.

Point of view and setting

He opens the story describing his connections with the Dresden bombing, and his reasons for writing the book. He describes himself, his book, and the fact that he believes it to be a desperate attempt at scholarly work. He then flows this into Billy Pilgrim's story, as he starts Billy's story as, "Listen: Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time." This serves as a transition from Vonnegut's point of view to the true third person.

As the author, Vonnegut appears as a minor character throughout the story. The character Kilgore Trout, whom Billy Pilgrim meets while the former runs a newspaper line, may also be seen as a persona of the author.

The structure of Slaughterhouse-Five closely resembles a Tralfamadorian novel, a different kind of literature Pilgrim encounters en route to Tralfamadore.

A successful film adaptation of the book, also called Slaughterhouse-Five, was made in 1972. The film won the Prix du Jury at the 1972 Cannes Film Festival, as well as a Hugo Award, and Saturn Award. Vonnegut has commended the film greatly.

William Clark Styron, Jr. (1925 - 2006) was an eminent American novelist and essayist.

Before the publication of his memoir Darkness Visible in 1990, Styron was best known for his novels which included Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which he wrote at age 25; The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), narrated by Nat Turner, the leader of an 1831 Virginia slave revolt; and Sophie's Choice (1979), which dealt memorably with the Holocaust.

William Styron was born in Newport News, Virginia, not far from the site of Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, later the source for his most famous and controversial novel. Though Styron’s paternal grandparents had been slave owners, his Northern mother and liberal Southern father gave him a broad perspective on race relations unusual for his generation. Styron’s childhood was a difficult one: his father, a shipyard engineer, suffered from clinical depression, which Styron himself would later experience, and his mother died of cancer before his fourteenth birthday.

His father soon sent the increasingly rebellious Styron to Christchurch School, an Episcopal college-preparatory school in the Tidewater region of Virginia. Styron once said, "But of all the schools I attended...only Christchurch ever commanded something more than mere respect - which is to say, my true and abiding affection."

On graduation, Styron enrolled in Davidson College, but eventually dropped out to join the Marines toward the end of World War II. Though Styron was made a lieutenant, the Japanese surrendered before Styron’s ship left San Francisco. Styron then enrolled in Duke University, which would later grant him a B.A. in English; here Styron also published his first fiction, a short story heavily influenced by William Faulkner, in an anthology of student work.

After his 1947 graduation, Styron took an editing position with McGraw-Hill in New York City. Styron later recalled the misery of this work in an autobiographical passage of Sophie’s Choice, and after provoking his employers into firing him, he set about his first novel in earnest. Three years later, he published the novel, the story of a dysfunctional Virginia family culminating in a young woman’s suicide, as Lie Down in Darkness (1951). The novel received overwhelming critical acclaim, including the prestigious Rome Prize, awarded by the American Academy in Rome and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, but Styron’s recall into the military owing to the Korean War prevented him from immediately accepting this award. After his 1952 discharge for eye problems, Styron transformed his experience at Camp Lejeune in North Carolina into his short novel, The Long March, published serially the following year.

Styron then spent an extended period in Europe. In Paris, he became friends with Romain Gary, George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, James Baldwin, James Jones, and Irwin Shaw, among others. The group founded the celebrated Paris Review in 1953.

The year 1953 was eventful for Styron in another way. Finally able to take advantage of his Rome Prize, he traveled to Italy. At the American Academy, he renewed an acquaintance with a young Baltimore poet, Rose Burgunder, to whom he had been introduced the previous fall at Johns Hopkins University. They were married in Rome in the spring of 1953.

Styron’s experiences during this period would later be recalled in Set This House on Fire (1960), a novel about intellectual American expatriates on the Riviera. The novel received, at best, mixed reviews, with several critics savaging it for what they described as its melodrama and undisciplined structure.

William Styron was awarded the Prix mondial Cino Del Duca in 1985. That year, he suffered from a serious depression which he would later recall in his popular memoir Darkness Visible (1990), in which (in the experience for many readers) he was (arguably) able to describe his descent into madness from the inside. His other works include a play, In the Clap Shack (1973) and a collection of his nonfiction pieces, This Quiet Dust (1982).

Styron died from pneumonia on November 1, 2006, at the age of 81 in Martha's Vineyard.

Sophie's Choice (1979) is a novel written by William Styron about a young American Southerner, an aspiring writer, who befriends the Jewish Nathan Landau and his beautiful lover Sophie, a Polish (but non-Jewish) survivor of the Nazi concentration camps. An immediate bestseller and the basis of a successful film, the novel is often considered both Styron's best work and a major novel of the twentieth century. The difficult decision that shapes the character Sophie is sometimes used as an idiom. A "Sophie's Choice" is a tragic choice between two unbearable options.

The novel won the 1980 National Book Award and was a nationwide bestseller. A 1982 film version was nominated for five Academy Awards, with Meryl Streep winning the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Sophie.

Sophie's Choice begins with the departure of its narrator, Stingo, from a stultifying position at a New York publishing house and his move to a Brooklyn boarding house to begin work on his own novel. (The early portion of the novel is closely based on Styron's own postwar experiences as a reader at McGraw-Hill). As his work progresses, Stingo supports himself with funds unexpectedly received, many years after the fact, from the unjust sale of one of his grandfather's slaves, Artiste -- an irony on which Stingo frequently reflects.

Stingo soon finds himself drawn into the lives of his upstairs neighbors, Sophie Zawistowska, a beautiful Polish survivor of Auschwitz, and Nathan Landau, a brilliant young Jewish man who claims to be a Harvard graduate and cellular biologist. Sophie and Nathan are lovers, but their relationship is punctuated by Nathan's escalating fits of jealousy and violence. Stingo quickly falls in lust with Sophie, though since he lacks the opportunity to woo her and also idolizes the charismatic Nathan, he continues to try to lose his virginity with other women, in tragi-comic episodes trenchantly revealing of late 1940s attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

Stingo gradually reveals Sophie’s past to the reader as she reveals it to him: the anti-Semitism of her father in Kraków; her refusal to aid the Polish underground movement during World War II; her own incarceration in Auschwitz for attempting to smuggle meat into the city for her dying mother. Sophie's story, which Stingo receives piecemeal, is supplemented by Stingo's own, later, research into the Holocaust. In particular, Sophie recounts her brief experience as a stenographer-typist in the home of Rudolph Höss, the Commandant of Auschwitz. We learn that Sophie attempted to seduce Höss in order to have her blonde, blue-eyed, German-speaking son, also confined in the camp, transferred into the Lebensborn program, which would have allowed him to be raised as a German child. When Sophie failed, she was returned to the camp, where she nearly died from malnutrition before her liberation. She never learned the fate of her son.

As Nathan's behavior becomes more erratic and abusive, Sophie tells Stingo about Nathan's past attempt to make a suicide pact with her. Answering a summons from Nathan’s brother Larry, Stingo discovers that Nathan is not a research scientist but rather a repeatedly-institutionalized paranoid schizophrenic. When Nathan’s jealous imaginings focus on Stingo and he threatens their lives, Stingo and Sophie attempt to flee to a Virginia farm belonging to Stingo's father. En route, Stingo learns Sophie's deepest secret: when she arrived at Auschwitz, a sadistic doctor ordered her to choose between the lives of her 7-year-old daughter, Eva, and her 10-year-old son, Jan. With only seconds to decide, she chose her son, leaving her with a guilt that she cannot overcome.

Stingo proposes marriage, and the pair share a single night of passionate sex before Sophie disappears. After following her back to New York, Stingo discovers that Sophie and Nathan have committed suicide in Sophie's apartment by swallowing cyanide capsules. Despite his devastation at the discovery, the novel closes with Stingo awakening on a beach and observing, with a quotation from Emily Dickinson (whose work plays a small but crucial role in the story), that it is morning -- "excellent and fair" -- suggesting a remaining shred of optimism.

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