[The] feeling of war as the condition of life pervades all of Styron's works: in Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton Loftis commits suicide on the day the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki; in Set This House on Fire Cass Kinsolving traces the beginning of his self-destructive striving to his experiences in World War II, which drove him to the psychiatric ward. And even The Confessions of Nat Turner, although set a full century earlier, is informed by the spirit of the battlefield.
Besides being inescapable, war is outrageously unreasonable. The enemy is undefined; heroic action becomes clownish and self-destructive…. What Styron shows in his most convincing fiction is, first, that beneath the calm and affluent exterior of modern life lies a violent potential, and, second, that this violence has a capricious life of its own and erupts as a senseless surprise, often in the form of an accident. He was feeling his way toward this vision in Lie Down in Darkness where, despite the influence of Faulkner, his characters are moved not by the logic of history but by ahistorical, irrational, and undefinable energies which burst through the mannered and manicured surface of their lives to drive them apart, frustrate connection, and deny psychological and aesthetic resolution. (pp. 6-7)
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