A problem with [My Argument With the Gestapo] is its static and unresolved quality, a problem which no one appears to have been more aware of than Merton himself. He admitted that there was in fact "no action" in the book…. There is surface movement throughout …, from the periphery of the war to its vortex, and from the present to the past—but the characters and the underlying situation remain essentially the same, whatever the superficial changes in nationality and locale. The purpose of this was apparently to underscore the moral similarity among the participants in the war, but the narrative effect is to create monotony. The complexity of the design, though, with its interweaving of not only past and present but real and unreal, dreamed and experienced, is stimulating. (p. 116)

[In the respect that the narrator accepts responsibility for the war,] the moral design strongly resembles that...