Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)

László Dányi: Universal implications of William Styton's Southern Heritage

24 must find a firm basis in the Souih and start somewhere in the world he knows. He was not a witness to the Holocaust and he tries to come to grips with the Holocaust over a distance of time and culture. Maria Hunt's story absorbed into Stingo's experience helps Styron to establish a starting point from where he can penetrate into the nightmarish world of NaziGermany. This is the way how Peyton's and Sophie's lives become history is SC, and the constituent elements of the two novels are incorporated in an internal relationship. Styron is a master in finding various approaches to Iiis protagonists' past, where they start their quest for pride, dignity and nobility. The difference is Styron's artistic treatment of Peyton's and Stingo's past provides an explanation for the difference in the ending of the two novels. Peyton would not have been able to endure the burden of Sophie's confessions. Stingo's supportive Southern background and innocence made the ending of SC possible. "This was not judgment day - only morning. Morning: excellent and fair."

3^ III. What is unique in William Styron's art? Styron is not just the follower of the myths analysed in the first part because he can create Iiis own myth in his encyclopedic novel, SC, All the motifs are intermingled and made internal. Altough the starting point of view is intensely personal and Southern, Styron extends the scope of his traditional themes and he has created characters who "are willing, out of a sense of an ultimate motive and purpose in life, to challenge it. This is why Peyton commits suicide and why Sophie Zawistowska, after surviving the absolute evil of Auschwitz, though physically dying there, endured further the demonic relationship with the schizophrenic Nathan Landau as a temporary recall to life."

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4 Styron drives his protagonists to the edge of the abyss, then they peer into deep, nihilistic spaces before. In tragic recognition of themselves, they pull pack, renewed, and they carry on their search, or ecstatically transformed they embrace their death. Styron, unlike his predecessors, met the tragedy of the Second World War. He himself incorporated the relationship of the individual and history. Americans do not like to learn that people can be unbalanced, desperate and sometimes corrupt but Styron confirms that life can be horrible. AH the former feelings of uncertainty, loss and disillusionment culminate during and after the war, and people found themselves