SOURCE: "The Long March: A Failed Rebellion," in William Styron Revisited, Twayne Publishers, 1991, pp. 50-8.

In this excerpt, Coale examines Styron's polarized vision of rebellion and authority, particularly what he sees as Styron's confusion over whether to portray the rebellious individual as heroic or as existentially absurd.

The Long March . . . stands as the prototype for several of Styron's later longer novels. Besides the thrust and crisis of rebellion on which the book is based, we also find the bifurcated hero, the observant witness, and the participant rebel, what David L. Minter has described in American literature as the distinction between the man of interpretation and the man of action or design. Such dialectical characters include Ishmael and Ahab in Moby-Dick, Nick Carraway and Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Coverdale and Hollingsworth in Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, and more recently Quentin Compson and Thomas Sutpen in Faulkner's Absalom...