Confessions of Nat Turner

Rating:
Summary: Great!
Review: A most interesting book written by a very intropsective author. Much like the book "A lesson Before Dying" it's focus is on American slavery but it's message is global. when we oppress others our crimes destroy the fabric of society. Yet it is wrong to place Nat Turner in the pantheon of Revolutionary heroes as some would like to see him. Nat Turner was more than likely unbalanced, he had a non-existant plan of action or behavior and his primary victims were children and women: a true sign of cowardice in any culture.

Rating:
Summary: Is this book a fictional adaptation of a single human
Review: being or is this book written by a white guy about an entire ethnic group? I have to be able to talk to you all about slavery, the buying and selling of human beings in the United States of America, a peculiar institution abolished by law only a few generations ago. Styron's book was a fictional account dealing not peripherally with these issues and specifically with one man, a United States of America slave. If there is a problem with the scholarship, judge the book by whatever incoherent and misguided poor writing that is to be found. I was moved with sympathy, tears, anguish, anger and ultimately love by this sublime novel. I wonder what Nat Turner would have said about Styron's adaptation? It is preposterous for anyone now living to decide the man's opinion for him. Styron is an artist. He is a brilliant writer of fiction. Obviously an opinion of my own, I'm jublilant we may each agree or disagree with my analysis. What am I hearing from critics that proclaim Styron's, Confessions of Nat Turner, racist? Am I hearing the equivalent of, "You can't write about that! You're the wrong shade of human!"? Let's keep talking and agreeing and disagreeing. William Styron initiated another dialoge of magnificent proportions.

Rating:
Summary: Not Great History but Great Book
Review: First, anyone coming to this book for the first time should not read it as an historical treatise, because it isn't. So far as is known, Nat Turner didn't display homosexual propensities, as he does in this book. The historical Turner was married; Styron's protagonist is not. Indeed, beyond his homosexual liaison with a fellow slave, he goes through life in Styron's historical novel as a celibate, lusting after nubile white girls when not plotting his apolcalyptic war against the white race. This was an issue that caused great controversy when the book first came out. It may still bother the historical purist. To others, this might be seen as a minor point. After all, Shakespeare wasn't above changing historical facts to make a more engrossing, dramatic play. There are those even today who assert the Bard unfairly maligned Richard the Third. For those wanting to read a Nat Turner biography, they should try Stephen Oates' "Fires of Jubilee." Having said all this, Styron's book remains one of the great American historical novels. Writers at their very best perform a sort of alchemy and Styron has always been adept at this, evoking a time and place long gone with a vivid wizardry and authenticity that is wonderful, even though he often writes about the most tragic of events (for example, his novel "Sophie's Choice" deals with the Holocaust). And, despite Styron's artistic license with certain aspects of the 1831 slave rebellion, this is a powerful story, populated with unforgettable characters, and a part of our American history that I think everyone should study and be aware of. To some, Nat Turner was a hero. To others, he was a demented murderer. Whatever your viewpoint, Styron is one of America's great writers and this is a book that should be read by anyone who is interested in where we have been as a country and apprehensive about where we are headed. Some of the issues inherent in Turner's story, and the story of those who followed him to their bitter doom, are as germane today as they were in 1831.

Rating:
Summary: My Great, Great Grandfather is not gay!
Review: I don't know why this William Styron is trying to lie on my great great grandfather. Needless to say I am a decendant of Nat Turner and it bothers me that this author is trying to lie to make this book more interesting. I cannot say for certainty that my grandfather was not gay or that he didn't like white women and neither can this author but I can say that Nat Turner was married and had children and I am a decendant of that union! As far as EVERYONE knows he was NOT gay and he certainly loved his African American Wife. William Styron had no reason to portray him as such other than to make this book more appealing and that detracts from Nat Turner because it was a falsity. Other than that idiotic portrayl the book was good.

Rating:
Summary: My Great, Great Grandfather is not gay!
Review: I don't know why this William Styron is trying to lie on my great great grandfather. Needless to say I am a decendant of Nat Turner and it bothers me that this author is trying to lie to make this book more interesting. I cannot say for certainty that my grandfather was not gay or that he didn't like white women and neither can this author but I can say that Nat Turner was married and had children and I am a decendant of that union! As far as EVERYONE knows he was NOT gay and he certainly loved his African American Wife. William Styron had no reason to portray him as such other than to make this book more appealing and that detracts from Nat Turner because it was a falsity. Other than that idiotic portrayl the book was good.

Rating:
Summary: Magnificent
Review: In August 1831, in a remote region of south-eastern Virginia, took place the only effective and sustained revolt in the history of American Negro slavery. That year, a black man, Nat Turner, awaits death in a prison cell. He is a slave, a preacher and the leader of the revolt. Mr Styron based his novel on the single significant contemporary document concerning this insurrection, namely a brief pamphlet of twenty pages called "The Confessions of Nat Turner", published in Richmond in 1831. The confession Turner made to his jailers under the duress of his God is a narrative describing a good man's transformation into an avenging angel even as it encompasses all the betrayals, cruelties and humiliations that made up slavery - and that is still present in the collective psyches of both races.
This magnificent book brilliantly depicts the American past in a dazzling narrative.

Rating:
Summary: Meditation on a murderous Moses
Review: The 1992 Vintage edition of "The Confessions of Nat Turner" has an afterword by the author that could be called "The Confessions of William Styron." Here, Styron responds to the criticisms that have plagued his novel about Nat Turner, the rebel slave who in 1831 instigated an insurrection that resulted in the murders of fifty-five white people, since its initial publication in 1967. Is Styron's novel the mature, scholarly work of a man who is genuinely fascinated with an ugly historical incident in his homeland (the Tidewater region of southeastern Virginia), or just an iconic relic of the Civil Rights era? Styron would insist on the former, but posterity may judge it to be the latter.

Intentionally or not, the novel is certainly a magnet for controversy simply because so few facts are known about Nat Turner's life, which required Styron to fill in the blanks with as many fictional elements as he could imagine; and many readers, perhaps misunderstanding Styron's agenda, are liable to dispute and even attack the fictional material for various reasons. Since this is not a biography, Styron was violating no ethical taboos by employing artistic license where he saw fit.

The novel begins with Turner sitting in a jail cell awaiting trial for his bloody crimes and delivering to his lawyer, Thomas Gray, what will be recorded in history as his "confessions." Speaking his bilious, violent words with precision, insight, and erudition, Nat tells the story of his life in a series of flashbacks, beginning with his childhood at the plantation of a wealthy miller named Samuel Turner, where his mother was a cook and therefore enjoyed a few more privileges than did most of the other slaves. Nat was a bright boy who, when he demonstrated a desire to learn how to read, was taught the Bible by Samuel Turner's wife and daughter. When financial ruin befell the Turner family, Nat was sold to a variety of owners until he finally came into the possession of a wheelwright named Joseph Travis.

As a sincerely devout man who strove to suppress his lust and remain celibate, and as probably the only literate black man in the county, Nat became a preacher to the other slaves, who were granted some liberties on Sundays but were not allowed to assemble. The hatred he had been nursing towards white people culminated on a day he received a divine vision to kill them all, to assume the role of a murderous Moses leading his people out of bondage to the promised land. While his friend and closest associate, Hark, enlisted as many slaves as possible for a revolt, he devised plans for the most merciless of massacres that succeeded to the extent that any white Southern sentiment for abolition was consequently cooled for the time being.

Styron is a meticulous, highly disciplined prose artist who writes novels that are compellingly readable and filled with savory details but somehow fail to substantiate themselves beyond the surface. The compensation for this in "The Confessions of Nat Turner" is the selection of a loaded and endlessly discussable topic: Is a man born in chains and consigned to die in chains to be blamed if he attacks his captor in anger? Turner, in Styron's eyes, would justify the murders as evil for evil, contending that the damage done to blacks by whites is irreparable and the only remaining option is destruction. Styron calls Nat Turner a psychopath, yet composes a portrait of him that is tense but controlled and, in its thematic denunciation of slavery, roundly empathic.





Rating:
Summary: A brilliant work of imagination, not a history book
Review: The Confessions of Nat Turner is one of Styron's most powerful works, a fascinating exercise in imagination. Styron begins with a true historical event -- a slave rebellion that struck terror into the hearts of white southerners before ultimately being quelled. Styron sees in the psychological tinder box ignited by the rebellion, and in its leader, Nat Turner, a little-understood passion play. Critics who complain that Styron doesn't answer some historical questions: "Gee, Nat's owner didn't treat him so bad, why'd he rebel?" miss the point. What fascinates Styron, and a careful reader, is what the fact of rebellion does to the minds and emotions of those it touches. Besides, anyone who finishes Styron's novel without a sense of why Turner led the rebellion wasn't reading very carefully; the whole novel turns on Styron's hypothetical answer to this question. One of the central conceits of the book is Styron's imagination that Turner could have been fueled by his sense that he had been chosen by God to lead his fellow slaves in an uprising. Styron paints a powerful picture of one driven by the conviction -- whether divinely inspired or delusional -- that he is a vengeful avatar called upon by a higher power to wreak vengeance on the perceived enemies of God. There is an obvious parallel here to the Harper's Ferry uprising led by John Brown (whom Russell Banks, in Cloudsplitter, depicts as similarly driven by mania), as well as to figures like Joan D'Arc. Styron, who wrote a moving memoir discussing his own struggle with mentally illness, has a special fascination with, and sensitivity to, such issues.

Rating:
Summary: The Beauty of (and Problem With) Historical Fiction
Review: This book is captivating. Its reflection on a history that too many people have forgotten (or at the very least pretend happened longer ago than it did) is something that people should be required to recollect. The perspective that Styron gives through the eyes of slave revolt leader Nat Turner is chilling- regardless of to what degree it reflects the "real" perspective of Turner. The truth is that we have no idea how closely it resembles Turner's perspective. But to have perhaps been given a glimpse of such an interesting piece of American history is something to not be missed.

If you do nothing else, pick up this book and read the first two paragraphs of Part III (Study War). Not only is it an excellent example of Styron's ability to write gracefully, but the content left me speechless. It is beautiful and frightening and enlightening.

Rating:
Summary: American classic from one of America's best
Review: This is a stunningly intense and powerful novel. The novel is written as the final confession of Nat Turner following his brutally violent slave revolt of 1831. The account is fictionalized though relies heavily on historical facts for its basis.

The novel is painfully tragic as Styron masterfully portrays Turner's existence within the deep south during slavery. Styron's novel is filled with many tragic ironies that mirror the strange logic of slavery and oppression. Turner is initially uplifted by the power of religion, but eventually uses the Bible and bizarre visions to justify his brutal revolt. Throughout the novel, Styron is even-keeled, never passing judgment on Turner, ultimately allowing the reader to come to his/her own conclusions. The novel is vivid and necessarily graphic in places as Styron depicts the harsh slave world where violence leads to more violence.

This is an important novel to read, for it gives important insight into how history shaped American race relations. Styron caught a lot of flak for writing this book (he is Caucasian), but ultimately, I believe his detractors are closed minded. His portrayal is simply stunning, and you needn't be white or black to understand Nat Turner's plight, but merely be a human.