[Set This House on Fire is] an ambiguous novel of outrage, one that also happens to be artistically flawed…. [It] treats, in distraught and melodramatic fashion, the regeneration of Cass Kinsolving. The regeneration of Cass, bumbling, guilt-ridden drunkard that he is, dates from his murder of a degenerate rapist, Mason Flagg. We move in a foggy world which the narrator describes as "a grotesque fantasy of events lacking sequence and order …". We are witness to the degradation of Cass at the hands of Flagg who forces him to paint pornographic pictures, to perform before an audience as a seal, and to sing bawdy songs on all fours. Flagg violates Cass's dignity, and to make doubly sure he rapes Cass's beloved Francesca. Violence, however, begets violence; Cass breaks open Flagg's skull with a stone. But the murder, although it may be of questionable justice, proves to be a redemptive act; victim and assailant do not become one. By concealing the murder, Luigi, the police corporal, forces Cass on his own resources; he robs him of the luxury of self-recrimination, the ease of guilt. In his darkest hour, Cass mutters: "And as I sat there … I knew that I had come to the end of the road and had found nothing at all. There was nothing…. I thought of being. I thought of nothingness. I put my head into my hands, and for a moment the sharp horror of being seemed so enormous as to make the horror of nothingness less than nothing by its side …" This is the brief moment of outrage for Cass, brief because he ends by accepting the burdens of freedom. But Set This House on Fire remains a flawed book by a very gifted writer, and one of its moral flaws is that while it brings us artificially close to the facts of violence, it ends by evading them. (pp. 243-44)
Ihab Hassan, in The American Scholar (copyright © 1965 by the United Chapters of Phi Beta Kappa; reprinted by permission of the publishers), Vol. 34, No. 2, Spring, 1965.
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