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3.5 

The Confessions of Nat Turner

By William Styron
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron digital book - Fable

Publisher Description

The “magnificent” Pulitzer Prize–winning and #1 New York Times–bestselling novel about the preacher who led America’s bloodiest slave revolt (The New York Times).

The Confessions of Nat Turner is William Styron’s complex and richly drawn imagining of Nat Turner, the leader of the 1831 slave rebellion in Virginia that led to the deaths of almost sixty men, women, and children. Published at the height of the civil rights movement, the novel draws upon the historical Nat Turner’s confession to his attorney, made as he awaited execution in a Virginia jail. This powerful narrative, steeped in the brutal and tragic history of American slavery, reveals a Turner who is neither a hero nor a demon, but rather a man driven to exact vengeance for the centuries of injustice inflicted upon his people.

Nat Turner is a galvanizing portrayal of the crushing institution of slavery, and Styron’s deeply layered characterization is a stunning rendering of one man’s violent struggle against oppression.
 
This ebook features a new illustrated biography of William Styron, including original letters, rare photos, and never-before-seen documents from the Styron family and the Duke University Archives.

71 Reviews

3.5
Expressionless Face“Like all the books I read, I picked up “The Confessions of Nat Turner” by William Sytron off a bargain table at my local bookstore for a tight $3.50. Blissfully unaware of the controversies surrounding the book, I put it on my to be read shelf and didn’t think a second more. After 8 days, I’ve finally finished Styron’s work. It took me longer than any other book took me to read this entire year, yet was nowhere close to the longest book. It’s also probably going to lead to the longest book review I’ve written too. So, I’m going to quickly summarize my feelings here: Styron is a brilliant writer who chose the worst possible subject, entirely because of his own biases and inability to grasp his failure. As a result, though written well, I couldn’t recommend this book to anyone, as it’s butchering of a historical figure is negligent at best and horribly racist at worst. 1.5/5, only some points for his wonderfully written prose. Okay, so I’ll start with the positive. Styron is clearly an incredible writer. I’ve never read his other works, but I had an appreciation for his meandering but rich paragraphs. His descriptions of wilderness and nature is peak, up there with Delilah Crawford and Cormac McCarthy’s works. Partly this book took a long time to read because I took my time crawling through the prose. Now, what’s the problem? Well, Styron chose to use a real life historical figure as his character. There is a tendency to claim innocence for fans of Styron (and Styron himself) that this is fiction. Styron is simply doing his version of events. Frankly, I don’t believe that Styron shouldn’t be able to do so. That, however, doesn’t mean I can’t critique Styron for his choices, as many other people have done for decades since the creation of the work. The primary critique that I strongly agree with is Styron’s choice to make Nat Turner obsessed with white women. There is no historical evidence to support this idea and it is entirely a fictional creation of Styron. Alone, maybe this was passable. However, the real Nat Turner had a wife and 2 children…all Black. Styron ignores these individuals, which is appalling on its own, but further rubs salt into the wound by instead making Nat obsessed with raping a white woman. Styron defends this claim by saying there is no evidence of a wife, which either means he didn’t do any research or didn’t do any good research. He also claims that the decision was due to Margaret’s importance to the revolution. However, as he mentions in his own defense, it’s possible that Margaret’s death was not consequential at all and was a microcosm of a larger struggle with Nat’s masculinity. Long story short: it’s entirely Styron’s choice and it is a patently offensive one. White authors erasing the existence of Black women is nothing new, but doing so alongside reinforcing 1800’s racist stereotypes in one stroke is certainly novel. Here’s the second issue: Nat’s rebellion failed in the book due to other Black men’s armed resistance. In fact, this is a key portion of the book from Styron’s view. Unfortunately, that never happened. The implication that Black men inherently could not overcome racism through revolution is, once again, a fictitious creation by Styron for his book. Of his choices, he has decided to 1) reinforce old stereotypes of Black men wanting to steal white women and 2) showcase the inherent inability for Black people to overthrow oppression. What the actual fuck? Finally, there is one other choice that is made that I find suspect but not really as serious as above. Almost every slave driver in this book is about the kindest soul you ever met, except for one. I can accept that austere Virginia handled their slaves likely better than the Deep South (better carries a lot of weight there), but I think it’s a bit of a stretch for all of these individuals to be so egalitarian. The existence of Jim Crow and segregation in those areas for decades after emancipation seem to suggest that brotherhood was not as grand as Styron…imagines. All of these things, save the weird obsession with white women, would likely have little effect on my grander enjoyment if it wasn’t twisting a living man’s existence. Nat’s toils were hard enough, to have a white writer 150 years later puppet Nat for his own racist ideologies is absurd. Frankly, it’s one of the worst depictions of historical fiction I’ve ever read. Seriously, “Abraham Lincoln Vampire Hunter” handled its subject matter with more grace. Why pick Nat Turner? Styron himself saw him as a religious fanatic whose devotion had to be turned down for the tale. Why pick a subject that you initially find impossible to use? Styron points out his childhood closeness to Tidewater as a source, but even then, why not write the story from Gray’s perspective? I believe Nat had a perfect mix of known and unknown quantities, which Styron saw to edit as he saw fit. I won’t go as far to say Styron shouldn’t have written this book or he shouldn’t be allowed to, but I would say that no one has any reason to read it. Styron’s obfuscations work towards creating a grander American slavery myth, that while is aspiring, is blatantly untrue and is built on lies that push Black men and women down. In attempting to delineate our shared history, Styron instead reveals the worst parts of whitewashing and inherent biases. His own failure to recognize this years later is abundantly clear in the new versions “response”. It’s whiny and contrite, most of the time ignoring the complaints by saying “it’s historical fiction!” Well, the fiction sucks. Clearly, “The Confessions of Nat Turner” gave me much thought. Unfortunately, those thoughts were mostly confusion and anger. Moments of wonder, inspired by Styron’s prose, crashed into the ground with no survivors as he, yet again, describes Nat’s wish to rape a white woman. Becoming the focus of nation-wide controversy, Styron stands by his work. Everyone else is wrong, I guess. 1.5/5, would not recommend to anyone.”
“It seems to me that people, including the author, willfully oversimplify this novel in a way that makes it easy to vilify and dismiss. There is no doubt that Styron stumbled into some troubling territory by choosing to adopt a first person perspective to write about an important, historical black figure in Nat Turner. In part, the trouble was that so little was/is known about Turner that for a white author to take on the task of exposing/creating his person is a supreme act of white coloniality. Under those circumstances, how could Styron not lay out Nat Turner’s interior self with white experience and bias and prejudice. And Styron makes this worse in his afterward by pretending that the choices he made are accountable to “logical” deductions that link together what few facts are left to modern readers about Nat Turner from historical records. To pretend that this novel was an objective, scientific act of forensic journalism seems dishonest to me. I think it is a different kind of mistake to see Styron as crafting the novel as an apology, atonement, and absolution for chattel slavery. Although he portrays some members of white households as sympathetic and (to a degree) innocent shouldn’t be taken as a further attempt to characterize Nat Turner as pathologically violent. Rather it seems like a more productive way to look at this characterization of some whites is to acknowledge how they had passively normalized the inhumanity of slavery because of its systemic and essential connection to their way of life. The acceptance of something as normal seems to coincide with a kind of naïve innocence that does not always have anything to do with one’s essential morality and nature. What I mean is that for Styron to choose to portray some whites as innocent is not the same as saying that they were without blame or that they were not complicit in the institution of slavery. Surely they were, just as we are, still, today to the extent that institutions governing the continuance of “normal” life are possible only because of the legacy of slavery. In this light, the tendency toward the normalization of slavery could and should seem like provocation enough for disruption … in this case through violence. It is still another kind of mistake to look back on this novel merely as a form of art and craft for which the author can be thought of fondly as a masterful prose stylist. I think he was. The writing in the novel is rich, engaging, and full of metaphoric meaning. But that can’t be the only grounds the novel stands on. In his blurb for the book, James Baldwin wrote that this novel took the challenge of writing our “common history,” which has a way of sounding like resolution: at last … a common history we can all get behind. This, too, feel like a mistake because that common history is really just something that all of us have in common and it is not something that we necessary apprehend with a common interpretation. That common history is complicated, and people care about it in different ways, but we are all commonly implicated in it, and it is really our duty to try to appreciate how that common history is meaningful to ourselves and others. Does Styron do a good job with this task, at least as I claim to understand it? Not really. His own comments suggest to me that this purpose of creating grounds for understanding a shared history was somewhat distant from his intentions. Were his intentions good – sure, yes, I think so. But good intentions can have bad consequences especially if we don’t examine our intentions well enough from the start.”

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