The Confessions of Nat Turner : Narrative, History, and God

The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967), William Styron's fourth novel, is written, like most of his other works, from the first-person point of view. This device is an attempt on the author's part to grasp "a closer awareness of the smell of slavery" by leaping into the consiousness of a black man, Nat Turner. To avoid a melodramatic rendering of the violent aspects of the Southampton insurrection, however, Styron chose to employ, as in Albert Camus' The Stranger, the way of telling the story through the eye of the condemned and in the style of recollection as in Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. This choice, arising from the author's own deep sense of history, serves to give the novel "a meditative quality," as he wants it to be "a meditation on history." Nat was taught to read as an "experiment" by his one-time master, Samuel Turner, the experiment which, though frustrating his dream of becoming a free Negro in the harsh slavery, eventually arouses in him "a sense of his own worth as a human being. "Through a study of the Bible, he falls into a religious fanaticism which leads him to the idea of letting the oppressed go free by exterminating all the white people. The figure of Nat as a religious fanatic is needed to provide the inner validity for his insurrection. Save for Samuel Turner and Jeremiah Cobb, the judge at Nat's trial, Margaret Whitehead is the only person with whom Nat could feel a mutual confluence of sympathy. In part I of this novel, "Judgment Day," he feels dissociated from God, and even in the last part, "It is Done...," he feels he can find no redemption. Still, at the last moment of his life in the jail, he feels he reaches God through his memory of Margaret : Nat as "an avenging Old Testament angel" has finally changed into Nat as "God's Child." Structurally, as Styron asserts, "the book expresses the idea of Old Testament savagery and revenge redeemed by New Testament charity and brotherhood—affirmation." The image in the novel of the white building standing on the promontory facing out upon the sea is a mystery. Yet, if we respect the author's words, "The relationship with God seemed to be the central thing in my own conception of the man [Nat]," we may interpret the building as a symbolic image of God