William Styron，a contemporary American novelist, was born in 1925 in Virginia。 He is the winner of Pulitzer Prize by the novel of The Confessions of Nat Turner。 Besides this, Styron also writes five excellent novels。 They are Lie down in Darkness, The Long March, Set This House on Fire, Sophie’s Choice and Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness。 During World War II, Styrononce served in the US Marine Corps。Since 1945, Styron began to publish short stories。In 1947, he graduated from Duke University。 In 2001, William Styron diedafter a long illness at the age of 81 due to lung disease。 Nowadays, the book Sophie'sChoice, as Diary of Anne Frank, has become a classic of Holocaust literature, and is widely discussed as compulsory reading book in American college classrooms。 It has even been recommended as a novel that the citizens in the whole state (Virginia) must read。 (Fan Gexin 51)

William Styron selected World WarⅡas the story’s background, which was full of death。 Different from the traditional Holocaust novels which put its emphasis on depicting the cruel war with a lot of words, Sophie’s Choice started its story with the first-person narration and the help of Sophie’s memorizing and narrating and told the readers that how painful and miserable of the survivors in spirits in the war from the perspective of the southern writer in America, whose name is Stinger。 Therefore, we can see that the writer didn’t record this period of history as normal, but concentrated on Sophie’s life after the war。 According to the analysis of this novel, Sophie’s Choice cannot be seen as a novel that simply focuses on the tragic fate of the Jews Commission Holocaust。 Styron not only depicts the whole life of Sophie but also cleverly describes the growth of the novel’s narrator Stinger and the process of his mental growth。 As a result, the theme that this novel reflects would be more complicated and the content would be more rich。 The profound themes supplied Styron’s sympathy and concern to the human’s living conditions。AAA

What’s more, Sophie’s Choice was translated into many languages and read by readers both at home and abroad。 It was also studied by many scholars both at home and abroad, such as: Fan Gexin’s “Sophie’s Choice and William Styron’s Choice” (1996) illustrates the evil theme, Fan Xin’s “Who killed the heroine? -- The Matter of Guilt in Sophie’s Choice” (2005) focuses on the guilt theme and Li Xiaoqian’s “ On Sophie’s Trauma in Sophie’s Choice” describes the tragedy of Sophie from the perspective of trauma theory。 This paper would analyze Sophie’s tragic fate in Sophie’s Choice from the aspect of the patriarchy society, the oppression of war and the complexed identities of Sophie。 It aims at uncovering the evil and inhumanity of the Nazis and reflecting the complexity of humanity and the corruption of society。