Word: styron
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...CONFESSIONS OF NAT TURNER, by William Styron. This brilliant, brooding "meditation on history" takes the reader into the heart of the Virginia slave who led a bloody rebellion...
...real father ran away when he was an infant, identified with his master and set himself apart from the Sambos--the field Negroes. He felt disgust at having to use their outhouse. But, as one slave infomred him, "Yo' ass black jes' like mine, honey chile." In this way Styron shows how Nat's relationship with Samuel Turner was tormented and complicated; the condition became radically worse when Nat was denied his promised freedom by a Baptist preacher in whose hands Samuel Turner had entrusted...
...became Nat's obsession and divine mission to kill all the white people in Southampton, Virginia. Styron, with historical justification, isolates Nat from his murderous followers and portrays the man's pure hate; it is calm, intelligent, and unrepentant. Others, says Styron, "hate but with a hatred which is all sullenness and impotent resentment, like the helpless, resigned fury one feels toward indifferent Nature throughout long days of relentless heat or after periods of unceasing rain." Nat, however, had known the white man and had been cultivated...
...sharp contrast which Styron draws between Nat and his friend Hark contrasts the puritanical nature of one with the worldly humor of the other. In Styron's view, Nat was largely motivated by sexual frustration, while Hark had no such similar hang-ups. It was Hark, too, who could murder ruthlessly. Nat maintanied a strange distance from the rebels' blood-spilling...
With the framework of an insurrection and trial, it would have been easy for Styron to produce an intense novel that maintained a delirious pitch throughout. What he has done, however, is to create imaginative visions and recollectons within the mind of the doomed slave and yet present the poignancy of the recent massacres and the impending execution. Styron is a great stylist and a perfectionist, but he certainly is not guilty of trying to present a cosmic view of the South or the declining prosperity of Virginia Tidewater. Criticisms of Styron's use of Nat's memory to describe...