![]() That's not to say that no slaves internalised this racism and looked down on other black people: I'm sure that happened. It seems like this represents not the thoughts of a fellow-slave, but rather the kind of racist white society around him. It was blue-gum country-nigger talk at its thickest, nearly impenetrable, a stunted speech unbearably halting and cumbersome with a wet gulping sound of Africa in it. ‘Yam, me tek 'ee dar, missy, me tek 'ee dar.’ I listened closely. Not only do other black characters have their patois transcribed in detail (and to the point of caricature), but Nat himself is made to see it in the worst possible terms. Where this moves from literary concerns to moral ones is the way Nat's stylistic flourishes are contrasted with the dialectal speech of other slaves. Nat Turner writes suspiciously like William Styron – and identifying author with character turns out to be of particular concern in a book like this. But I'm afraid I didn't find it especially beautiful – just overblown and consciously literary in a way that distracted from the story. Of course this is fiction, and there is no real reason why Styron can't just abandon verisimilitude and write however he likes – and if the writing were beautiful I would probably not care. What it sounds like is an overeducated middle-class 20th-century writer. I heard from afar, across the withering late summer meadows, the jingle of a cowbell like eternity piercing my heart with a sudden intolerable awareness of the eternity of the imprisoning years stretched out before me: it is hard to describe the serene mood which, even in the midst of this buzzing madness, would steal over me when as if in a benison of cool raindrops or rushing water I would suddenly sink away toward a dream of Isiah….ĭoes this really seem like the way a psychopathic uneducated slave would talk? Not to me it doesn't. By the end of the book, as he really tries to ratchet up the sense of drama, he is writing things like this: This is from his introductory remarks on the first page. It may be the commencement of spring or perhaps the end of summer it matters less what the season is than that the air is almost seasonless – benign and neutral, windless, devoid of heat or cold. Yet the register of his narration is jarringly elevated: Nat has scrabbled together a self-taught literacy through a study of the Bible. ![]() The book is narrated by Nat Turner, the poor and uneducated slave who led a rebellion against white society in 1831. The book may have won the Pulitzer, but for me it has two major problems: the narrative voice is wildly inappropriate and the characterisation is on ethically shaky ground. Some have traced the outcry which followed its release to the simple fact that a white Virginian author was writing his way into the mind of a 19th century black slave, but that is hardly the issue. I didn't know about any of that when I started it, but the more I read the novel, the more dissatisfying and even irresponsible it started to seem. This book caused quite a controversy when it came out in 1967, and judging from some of the reviews here and on Amazon, it's continuing to do so.
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