On The Polyphony Of Sophie's Choice

Sophie's Choice, the 1980 National Book Award winner novel by the outstanding American writer William Styron, reflects the confusion and complexity of people's thoughts and their disordered life during and after World War II. Its publication aroused an immediate and heated debate among critics who were greatly concerned with its complicated structure and puzzling themes.The multi-themes triggered by Styron's contradictory attitude demonstrated in the novel towards the good and the evil reflect the diversity of the novel's polyphonic themes. Different characters have different consciousness, which, with equal value and independent existence, responds to and interacts with one another, showing the significant effect of the polyphonic novel, i.e. the reinforcement of subjectivity of characters. A unique narration style appears in the novel-- from different perspectives and out of different feelings, the hero and heroine look back with nostalgia and expatiate on their inner guilt through great dialogue and microdialogue. The art of foil, juxtaposition and dialogism among the characters show undoubtedly the polyphonic features so far as the novel's structure is concerned. And the novel displays Styron's modern sense and creative thinking. The present thesis illustrates the polyphony of the theme, subjectivity and dialogism in Sophie's Choice, with Bkahtin's polyphony as theoretic basis, intending to provide a new perspective for the interpretation of the novel.This thesis consists five parts: introduction, three chapters and conclusion. The introduction begins with the significance of the study before a brief literature review both at home and abroad. Then presented are the thematic idea and the theories and approaches to be employed for the study.The first chapter provides the reader with the spiritual basis of the polyphonic themes and illustrates the thematic plurality and the humanity demonstrated in the polyphonic themes. Styron is supposed to take humanity as his essence though he offers multiple themes in the novel.Chapter two explores the subjectivity, or self-consciousness of Stingo and Sophie, the two main characters in the novel, the focus of the description by Styron. With more independence in the novel, the characters turn out to be the images of ideas which, as usual, are the direct object of the artistic description. Chapter three studies"Dialogism"(including great dialogue and microdialogue), the core of the polyphonic theory, and its application in the novel. The omnipresent dialogism in both content and form of Sophie's Choice offers a source for the study of great dialogue and microdialogue respectively. This chapter gives an analysis of how great dialogues occur in the novel and how they function in the characters'relationship. The dialogue between reader and writer shows clearly the participation of the reader in the process of novel creation. And microdialogue is found to exist in the dialogues between characters and the interior monologues of characters.The final part concludes that the novel with theme plurality, characters'subjectivity and dialogism, contains higher artistic value, because Styron touches the depth of the characters'soul by describing"man in man"with the help of the theory of polyphony, reaching"the realism in the higher sense"in Bakhtin's concept. Styron's Sophie's Choice not only shows the polyphonic features but also brings about dialectical idea about the good and the evil on humanity.