SOURCE: “The Myth of the Fall and the Dawning of Consciousness in George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin,” in World Literature Today, Vol. 57, No. 1, Winter, 1983, pp. 30-43.

In the following essay, Brown studies the autobiographical aspects of the character “G” in Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin, giving special consideration to the effect that Lamming, writing as an adult with an adult perspective, has regarding the awareness and experiences of a child.

In 1958 George Lamming wrote that the modern black writer's endeavor is like that of “every other writer whose work is a form of self enquiry, a clarification of his relations with other men, and a report on his own highly subjective conception of the possible meaning of man's life.” A writer's self-inquiry constitutes his first world—“the world of the private and hidden self, the world hidden within the castle of each man's...