The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron

[George]

Please comment here on 'The Confessions of Nat Turner' by William Styron, 1968 Pulitzer Prize winner for fiction.

[Irene]

I kept feeling like I had already read it. But I don't think so. I wonder why Styron decided to narrate this in the voice of someone with an elite education. Turner might have been literate, but his only reading material was the Bible. Had he used something like King James English, I might have accepted that. But this felt so unnatural.
I was surprised by the afterward in my version. I was not aware of the contraversy around this novel.

[George]

I have mixed feelings after reading this novel.

It is an interesting, sad, bleak, tragic, violent historical fiction novel about Nat Turner, who incited a mass murder and rape in the Virginia of 1831, with around 55 people killed. Nat, aged 31, is about to be executed. He narrates the story of his life. How he witnessed white man’s cruelty and violence towards blacks. How he learned to read and write. He develops a pure and obdurate hatred for white men. He becomes a self designated prophet, a ‘Nigger Preacher’. He states he only killed one person, a white lady.

I liked the afterword by William Styron, where he writes about the criticism of his novel and his reasons for some of the decisions he made in the novel. Styron writes that he based his novel on the written statement made by Nat Turner, although the confessions were actually from the notes of a white lawyer, Thomas Gray. Styron focuses on the killing of Margaret Whitehead, a white woman, and Styron imagined that Nat Turner has a sexual obsession with the white woman. Styron ignored the fact the Turner did have a wife named Cherry.

Black critics commented that the novel misrepresented Nat Turner, portraying him with a racist trope of a white woman-obsessed predator and caricaturing other Black characters as unintelligent ‘sambos’.

Overall, an interesting, depressing novel about a tragic historical time. It is not a novel I would reread. The author did not fully explore how psychologically unbalanced Turner's mind must have been.

[Irene]

I am surprised this gained the literary acclaim it did. I kept comparing it to James when I was reading it. James is a much better book in my opinion.