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Summary: Chapter Fourteen

Nathan, Stingo and Sophie all quickly reconciled. One day, Nathan casually proposed taking a trip to the South with Stingo as his guide, and Stingo became excited about the idea. Nathan suggested that they go in October and mentioned that he and Sophie were planning to marry in October. A short time later, in the last week of September, Stingo received a phone call from Nathan’s brother, Larry, asking him to meet. At the meeting, Larry explained that his brother was not a scientist and had not received any university training. Larry said that Nathan did have an undemanding job at Pfizer, which had been arranged by a family friend in order to give the pretense of him having a job, but the story of Nathan being a brilliant research biologist was a total fabrication. Larry told Stingo that his brother was schizophrenic and that because their family was quite wealthy, they had tried to get him the best care and give him the most normal life possible. Larry had allowed Nathan to maintain his delusions but was now concerned that Sophie was being lured into a marriage without knowing the truth.

Larry vaguely hoped that Stingo might be able to help Nathan recover from his drug habit. He also wanted Stingo to report back to him if Nathan ever got out of hand, and Stingo agreed to do so. However, Stingo almost immediately received an invitation from an old college friend, Jack Brown, to come and stay with him, his wife, and his sister-in-law for a vacation in upstate New York. Stingo was eager to spend time with Jack and intrigued by the prospect of the sister-in-law, Mary Alice, so he headed off to the country. Stingo was quickly frustrated by Mary Alice, who willingly pleasured him with her hand every night but refused to do anything else. Stingo finally confronted Mary Alice, who explained that she had slept with one man before, after they had become engaged. However, the man had abandoned her before the marriage, and she had vowed that she would never sleep with another man unless she was married to him. Stingo chastised Mary Alice for her refusal to sleep with him and stormed off to bed. There, he had a dream that he was having sex with a man.

The next day, Stingo received a phone call from Morris Fink telling him to come back because Nathan had become unhinged and violent again. Stingo tried to call Larry but learned that Larry was out of town at a conference. When Stingo arrived in New York, Sophie and Stingo went to have drinks, and she told him about the past few weeks since he had left New York. At first, Sophie and Nathan had been happy and had spent a lot of time planning their wedding and subsequent honeymoon to the South. However, one night, Nathan used drugs again and lashed out, accusing Sophie of infidelity. Sophie declined to say who Nathan believed she was sleeping with, but he had become more and more angry and had pointed a gun at her. At this point, Sophie believed that Nathan needed to be institutionalized. Stingo resolved to move Sophie into a hotel for her safety, try to contact Larry again, and then look for Nathan himself.

Back at the boarding house, Stingo urged Sophie to hurry with her packing. He received a phone call from Nathan and tried to keep him calm but eventually realized that Nathan was accusing him of having an affair with Sophie. Nathan was enraged and threatened both Sophie and Stingo, firing a gunshot into the receiver.

Summary: Chapter Fifteen

Sophie and Stingo boarded a train to Virginia by way of Washington, D.C. Before leaving, Stingo had managed to get in touch with Larry, who had promised to hurry to New York. Aboard the train, Stingo started to feel calmer and more cheerful. He assumed that he and Sophie would have to get married if they were going to live together, and he looked forward to a happy life writing his novel and being with her. However, Stingo quickly became frustrated when he noticed that Sophie had started drinking and asking questions about phoning Nathan. She also began to talk about her hopes of writing about Auschwitz and lamenting her feelings of guilt. Eventually Sophie became so drunk and distressed that Stingo took her to a shabby hotel in Washington to recover before continuing their journey. There, Sophie asked Stingo to explain where they were going. Stingo confided that he was in love with her and hoped that they would marry and live together in Virginia.

Sophie hesitated, saying that she was much older than Stingo. She suggested they simply live together for a while, but Stingo explained that would be socially unacceptable in a conservative region. Sophie abruptly told him that she had to confide something. Stingo made her another drink. Sophie talked about her time in Warsaw, when she became more and more haunted by shame over her complicity in her father’s anti-Semitic actions. One day, she confided in Wanda about her relationship to the pamphlet. To Sophie’s surprise, Wanda didn’t seem to care and said that Sophie was not to blame for the actions of her father. That night, Sophie watched as Wanda sold stolen weapons to two Jewish men to help them defend themselves. Later, Wanda predicted that the Nazis would turn against Gentiles as well. She predicted the deaths of herself, Sophie, and the two children. Sophie told Stingo that Wanda was a lesbian and that the two of them occasionally slept together during their time in Warsaw.

After their arrest, Sophie, Wanda, and the children endured a torturous train ride to Auschwitz. When they arrived, a Nazi physician boarded the train. Knowing that people were being sorted into groups to meet their fates, Sophie told the official that she and her children spoke German and were Christian, not Jewish. The physician reacted with interest to her claim to be Christian and offered her a terrible choice: Sophie could keep one of her children, and the other would be sent to die. Sophie insisted that she couldn’t choose but finally handed over Eva, who was taken away to the gas chambers. Faced with the horror of this story, Stingo speculated that the physician must have been wrestling with his faith and morality in this moment of extreme crisis. Stingo supposed that the Nazi physician would have wanted to voluntarily commit the worst act he could think of in order to reaffirm both the possibility of evil and the possibility of faith and redemption.

Summary: Chapter Sixteen

Sophie and Stingo went to dinner. Eventually Stingo asked questions about Jan, and Sophie admitted that if she could find her son, she might finally feel redeemed. She had thought about looking for him, but the parents of other Lebensborn children were never able to locate their lost children, and she did not believe there was much chance he ever got out of the camp. After drinking heavily, the pair went back to the hotel to sleep. In the middle of the night, Sophie woke Stingo up and asked him to have sex with her. He eagerly complied, and they spent the rest of the time enthusiastically making love. In the morning when Stingo woke up, Sophie was gone.

Stingo hurried downstairs and learned from the hotel staff, who had overheard a phone call, that Sophie had gotten up early and returned to Brooklyn to reunite with Nathan. Stingo later pieced together what had happened: at some point while he and Sophie were travelling, Nathan returned to the boarding house without anyone noticing and waited there in Sophie’s room. Morris heard the sound of music coming from Sophie’s room but didn’t know whether that meant Nathan was there or not. As a result, he hesitated about whether he should call Larry even though he had been instructed to do so. While Morris debated, Sophie emerged from the room and asked him to go and get her a bottle of whiskey. Morris did so and left it outside the door and then went to take a nap. When he woke up, the alcohol was still outside the door, so he phoned Larry, and the two men broke down the door after no one responded to their cries.

When Stingo first found that Sophie had fled back to Brooklyn, he brooded at the hotel for a while and then decided to go south without her. He didn’t get very far, however, before he panicked and hurried back to New York. Once he began this journey northward, Stingo became fearful of what was going to happen to Sophie. By the time he arrived at the boarding house, there were ambulances and police outside. Larry caught sight of Stingo and let him go inside, where Stingo found Nathan and Sophie lying in bed together. They had killed themselves by taking sodium cyanide.

Nathan and Sophie were buried side by side. Stingo read an Emily Dickinson poem at the funeral. Afterwards, he went to Coney Island, where he immersed himself in memories. He wept on the beach before finally falling asleep there. The next morning, he awoke and wrote a line of poetry.

Analysis: Chapters Fourteen–Sixteen

Stingo and Sophie’s willingness to readily reconcile with Nathan reflects their co-dependent and masochistic tendencies. They were both shamed and hurt by the way Nathan treated them, and by now they both know about Nathan’s violent history. However, they put these feelings aside because they crave the comfortable routine that Nathan offers to them. Stingo is sometimes critical of Sophie’s passivity, but he is just as willing to reconcile with Nathan, which shows that Stingo also falls prey to a desire for a reassuring masculine presence in his life. In the absence of Stingo’s father, Nathan fills the void of a male role model in Stingo’s life. Nathan offering Stingo money also creates a dynamic of dominance in their relationship. Stingo interprets the money as a sign that his writing is being valued and is too naïve to realize that Nathan is likely buying his silence and complicity.

Stingo’s passivity is revealed even more starkly when he fails to take action after learning the truth about Nathan’s mental illness. Stingo has access to information that Sophie does not, which puts him in a position of moral responsibility to act in her best interest. Sophie has also been incredibly open, transparent, and vulnerable with Stingo, but he does not reciprocate this behavior, showing a lack of loyalty. Stingo is torn between his affection for Nathan and Sophie, which demonstrates that his bond of friendship with Nathan is almost as strong as the desire and romantic feelings he harbors for Sophie. Stingo also models his behavior on the way he sees Larry treating Nathan, and since Larry keeps Nathan’s secret and enables him to continue lying to Sophie, Stingo feels more justified in taking the same action. Part of why Stingo and Sophie get along so well is because both of them usually default to paralysis and inaction when facing a moment of crisis. Stingo’s inability to reveal Nathan’s true mental state also reflects his desire not to destroy the illusion he loves of a sophisticated and educated man praising Stingo’s writing. Stingo clings to a lie rather than face the harsh realities of a truth, similarly to how Sophie attempts to rewrite the story of her past in order to avoid facing past trauma.

However, once Nathan erupts into violence, Stingo finally takes the role of the hero in the narrative, finding the sense of agency to stand up for himself and for Sophie. Paradoxically, Nathan’s accusation that Stingo is having an affair with Sophie serves to empower Stingo. Stingo has always thought of himself as inferior and emasculated in comparison to Nathan, but the implication that Stingo could be capable of being Sophie’s lover actually imbues him with a newfound sense of self-confidence. Once Stingo begins to act in an assertive and decisive manner, Sophie surrenders to him in the same way she previously, passively surrendered to Nathan. Sophie’s compliance with his plans further inflates Stingo’s confidence, and his behavior towards her begins to resemble the way he has behaved with other women before. Stingo often gets himself into trouble by making assumptions about the outcome of his interactions with women without consulting them and then getting frustrated when they have their own perspectives. This pattern repeats here when he springs his plan to get married on Sophie and is hurt by her hesitation.

Sophie’s motivations for finally telling Stingo the full truth about Eva’s fate are not entirely clear. When Sophie and Stingo flee from New York, Sophie’s willingness to go might represent a step towards a new life or just be yet another example of her pattern of passive and fatalistic acceptance. Because Stingo provides Sophie with so little information about the plans he has for them, it is unclear what degree of consent she exercises. If we believe that Sophie went with Stingo intending to build a new life for herself, telling him the full truth about Eva’s fate represents a gesture of trust and intimacy and an attempt to move beyond her past. On the other hand, if Sophie simply went along with Stingo because she was sunk too far into despair to resist, then sharing her secret could represent her final surrender. It is possible, especially given her previous suicide attempt at the beach, that Sophie is already planning to end her life and simply wants to disclose her secret to at least one person before she does.

The story of Sophie’s terrible choice provides the ultimate insight into Sophie’s shame and belief that she is a terrible person. It also provides a highly personal context for the scope of the historical atrocities of the Holocaust. The vivid and specific imagery of a young girl toddling along clutching her flute provides an argument for why art must exist alongside history. Stingo has read about the Holocaust and can quote statistics about the millions of lives lost, but the full horror of what happened to specific individuals has never been clear to him. Sophie has tried to hide her story because she couldn’t bear to live through the pain of retelling it, but the commemoration of this event is important for the way it forces someone like Stingo to actually reckon with the grotesque horrors of what happened. As a mother, Sophie’s deepest desire was to protect and nurture her children, and she was forced to betray herself by acting in direct contradiction to this driving impulse. Sophie has been tormented by the other moments when she was forced to act in ways that contradicted her sense of morality, but being required to pronounce a death sentence on her own child represents the moment when she became indiscernible from the very people who were tormenting her.

Stingo and Sophie’s sexual encounter represents a brief moment of resistance to suffering and an insistence on claiming pleasure even amidst the darkest possible context. Sophie needs to numb herself after the agony of recounting what happened to her daughter, and she uses sex as a way to temporarily block out her memories. Offering her body to Stingo also functions as a reward for the way he has patiently listened to her and coaxed the truth from her. Ironically, Stingo has always assumed that he would lose his virginity when he showed that he was powerful and confident, but Sophie is the one who boldly initiates their encounter. While Stingo experiences great pleasure while having sex with Sophie, their physical intimacy also represents the symbolic loss of innocence that began when Sophie told him her most horrifying secret. Throughout the novel, Stingo has longed for the maturity and knowledge he assumed would come from having sex for the first time, but in order to participate in the full spectrum of human experience, he also has to confront the darkest depths of evil.

Nathan and Sophie’s joint suicide reveals that some pain is so great that it can’t be rectified, particularly when it is kept secret. Sophie’s trauma and guilt are so intense that she cannot move on, which is understandable given the magnitude of what she endured. However, the one thing she never tried was living openly with the legacy of what she endured. Had she done so, she might have found some kind of relief. Likewise, Nathan’s mental illness causes him so much pain that he finds life unendurable, but he has also had to live with secrecy rather than openly being able to seek help. Presumably, in spite of their intimacy and their conjoined deaths, Sophie and Nathan were never even fully honest with one another. Sophie died believing that Nathan could see some fundamental truth about the nature of who she was instead of understanding that he suffered from paranoid delusions. Sophie and Nathan’s deaths and funeral also showcase the Gothic overtones of the novel since the couple makes a macabre choice to remain perpetually united in death as well as life.

While Sophie and Nathan surrender to their pain and their desire for death, Stingo chooses to see his pain as generative and creative. Years later, the events of the summer become fodder for a novel that allows him to explore the darkness of the Holocaust and share Sophie’s story with the world, ensuring that her memory will live on. In this way, by opening up to Stingo, Sophie finally makes the impact she had so desired to do in the Resistance movement. In the more immediate term, Stingo clings to art as a way to make sense of his grief and loneliness. Reading Emily Dickinson at the funeral symbolizes Stingo’s belief that literature can offer a way to navigate situations where all else, including religious faith, fails to provide any consolation or meaning. Stingo’s return to the beach after the funeral represents his desire to feel a sense of connection to Nathan and Sophie and also his intuitive belief that nature can offer him a model for persevering through change and loss. The cycle of the tides and the rotation of the sun represent consistency and continuity as well as the possibility of renewal. In spite all of the emotional and spiritual darkness that dominates the novel, the text ends with the imagery of morning and a creative reawakening. Stingo ends the novel a sadder yet wiser man, and by having arrived at emotional and intellectual maturity, he can now share his insights and voice with the world.


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