The Confessions of Nat Turner, by William Styron
By Peter on Jul 9, 2010 in Classical novel, Excellent book, William Styron, World literature, book review
This masterpiece of a novel won Styron the 1967 Pulitzer Prize. Also, Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005. It was controversial at the time it was published, due to a large extent to the heated discussions about issues concerning race in the USA at the time.
The book is about a revolt 
The Confessions of Nate Turner is based on an extant document, the “confession” of Turner to the white lawyer Thomas Gray. In the historical confessions, Turner claims to have been divinely inspired, charged with a mission from God to lead a slave uprising and destroy the white race.
William Styron, of course, takes liberties with the historical Nat Turner. Nat Turner is a man whose life is undocumented, and so Styron created a life. And the book is on the whole fairly sympathetic to Turner, at the same time as it does not express such sentiments concerning Turner’s thoughts and ideas.
The book tells the story of Nat Turner and the uprising masterfully. But more than that; it is also a tale of some of the extremely agonizing and hard essences of slavery. Styron tells the story using the mind of a slave, and recreates and reconstructs masterfully in a way that makes this book a kind of literary history that conveys not only the facts but also the experiences of slavery. The Confessions of Nat Turner is narrated by Nat himself as he lingers in jail through the cold autumnal days before his execution.
This is not a fun novel. Rather it is very dark, and full of ugliness and very negative characters from both sides of the divide. It is, however a very deep and penetrating novel, with excellent psychological analyses, that uncovers and lays bare motivations and shows in considerable detail some of the extremely dehumanizing aspects of the institution of slavery as it once existed.
The Confessions of Nat Turner is a great story that still deserves to be read. It is a masterful novel, an important novel in American literature, and a book that will forever have a special place in the literature of the United States.
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