Let The Past Speak

William Styron is recognized as one of the most influential authors in America in the late twentieth century. His masterpiece Sophie’s Choice is even seen as an excellent work about the Holocaust, which won the American Book Award in 1980. With some unique narrative strategies, it reconstructs the most catastrophic disaster of the Holocaust, representing the past based on the reality. By exploring this novel’s unique narrative strategies, this thesis mainly discusses how Styron reconstructs the unspeakable past of the Holocaust so as to reveal his idea about the relationship between language and reality.This thesis consists of four chapters. Introduction briefly explains the scholarly context, introduces the research question and points out the significance of this research.In Chapter Two, firstly the thesis distinguishes two concepts:history and the past. Then it further discusses theoretical debates on the nature of history and reviews the fact that under the influence of postmodernism, the representative function of history is under serious attack.Chapter Three, the main part of this thesis, mainly discusses Styron’s methods to represent the past from two perspectives. First, this thesis focuses on the interweaving narrative time and space. Juxtaposition of Sophie’s experiences in Auschwitz and American daily life makes the general reader reconsider the Holocaust. Furthermore, fictionalization of the Holocaust and historization of narration help to set a bridge between history and reality, which enables the author to represent history based on reality. Second, the narrative unreliability is examined. By adopting the first person narration, the novel reveals the unreliable narration of the Holocaust. Then through the distinct comparison between the unreliable narration made by Sophie and the reliability of the implied author, the unreliable narrator-Sophie is exposed. And lastly the significance of narrative unreliability is explored, which turns readers’attention from the facts of the Holocaust to some deep meditation about good and evil.The conclusion of this study is that although Styron is fully aware of the complex relationship between language and reality, he has faith in language, believing that language can represent the past in a sense. Hence with the help of some narrative strategies such as interweaving time and space and narrative unreliability, he lets the past speak. By adopting narrative strategies, he reveals a different version of the Holocaust, making people reinterpret it rationally.