Word: nat
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Despite his own careful pains to avoid sounding too intelligent, Nat became disgusted and enraged when his fellow Negroes ingratiated on whites. Take this passage, for example, with Nat, Hark (another slave), and old Judge Cobb...
Styron's book is spoken by Nat as he lies in jail, beaten, chained, freezing, starving, and waiting to be hanged. The progression of time from the start to the end of the novel is short--it covers a few passing moments with Gray in jail, at the trial, and then in the jail again before the execution. In between these events are Nat's recollections of his own past. Styron's weaving of past and present is complex but in no way confusing. It is a great credit to Styron's art that he can leap about chronologically...
...many monologues which weave throughout the novel, Styron has Nat think in an eloquent, clear, 20th-century style. But in conversation, Nat employs a number of dialects which only a Virginia-raised craftsman like Styron could create...
True to the South's Protestant tradition, Nat's fundamentalism is based on the Old Testament. He quotes frequently the verses of Isaiah. With white people, he talks in a subdued nigger-rhetoric fitting for a pious black Baptist minister (which he is). With other houses slaves his tone is slightly more relaxed, and with field Negroes (whom he holds in disdain) it becomes much more Sambo-ish. The juxtaposition of Nat speaking in several of his roles can at times be very amusing, and at other times--as when he speaks in an inferior style before less intelligent white...
...this same Hark who, according to Nat, "gave expression to that certain inward sense that every Negro possesses when, dating from the age of twelve or ten or earlier, he becomes aware that heis only merchandise, goods, in the eyes of all white people devoid of character or moral sense or soul." Hark called this feeling "black-assed," and it summed up the numbness and dread in every Negro...