As usual Styron structures his novel by re-arranging the time sequences within it to provide the most shocking and dramatic events which are gradually revealed and lead up to Sophie's "final choice" concerning the life and death of her children at Auschwitz.

The older Stingo recalls the Stingo starting out in 1947. The younger Stingo plays brother-confessor to Sophie's narrative revelations which continually shift and change the closer she gets to the complex truth of her nature and of her way of surviving the Holocaust.

Thus the reader must penetrate a nest of narratives beginning with the older Stingo, progressing to the younger, and then leading on to Sophie's revelations.

The effect of this sequence of withholding information increases the necessity of its bursting forth, a kind of return of the repressed that, in being repressed, must all the more come forward and be finally expressed as violently and...