In this excerpt, Cologne-Brookes sees in The Long March signs of a change in Styron's emphases, from his earlier view that literature is a way to achieve harmony in a chaotic world to his later conviction that art is necessarily part of a dialogue with sociohistorical matters.

Below, Ratner provides an overview of the techniques and symbolism that Styron uses in The Long March "enlarging the narrative into his general theme of rebellion."

In the excerpt below, Malin discusses symbolism, characterization, and Styron's use of body imagery and contrast.

Below, Nigro argues that The Long March is about the degeneration of a classical hero type into an "anti-hero" due to the corruption of the military. The critic also suggests that the military is symbolic of American society where, he argues, there is no place for the heroic personality.

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.

In this excerpt, Brandriff describes The Long March as the story of one man's tortured discovery of the disorder and chaos that underlie the surface of civilization.

In the following excerpt, McNamara finds that the plot, structure, and metaphors of Styron's novella demonstrate the author's point that both acceptance of and obedience to authority are necessary and that protest is hopeless.

Here, Ruderman observes that Mannix, by virtue of his suffering and indomitable will against the impersonality of the military, achieves a heroic triumph.

The American Muse dictates its own terms of refashioning reality, and almost always these will take a highly personal, even solipsistic turn. One prominent example of such turning is William Styron's Sophie's Choice, ostensibly an attempt by one of our major novelists to come to grips with the meaning of Auschwitz but actually, as we shall see, a much different kind of book. Sophie's Choice is not an historical novel and, despite its fascination with Auschwitz, is at bottom not even pri...

Since the time he started writing, it seems to have been [Styron's] conscious aim to perpetuate the great tradition in Southern literature, and to assume the throne left vacant by William Faulkner by producing something that, in terms of both its themes and its historical scope, could merit comparison with The Sound and the Fury, Look Homeward, Angel, and All the King's Men…. Styron's first published book, Lie Down in Darkness, [was] treated with almost universal respect and had ...

In the following assessment of The Long March, Walcutt argues that the author had to sacrifice characterization and credibility to get his point across.

[William Styron] has hazarded a novel, Sophie's Choice, which attempts to defy the notion (George Steiner) that "in the presence of certain realities art is trivial or impertinent." It is an extraordinary work, destined, I would dare forecast, to become a major landmark in this debate around the morbid genre which has become known as Holocaust Literature. Not that Sophie's Choice is morbid; even though the novel's atmosphere hangs over me and I feel it will haunt for a lon...

A man on his judgment day, reflecting on his moral responsibility for past actions and the possibility of redemption—this is an important motif not only in The Confessions of Nat Turner but in Styron's two other novels as well. (p. 110) [Particularly] in The Confessions of Nat Turner, the recollective character of the hero's meditation on past experience provides the structural key to the novel. When The Confessions of Nat Turner is viewed from this perspective, the existential question...

In this excerpt from an interview that was originally published in 1977, Styron speaks of how his resentment of authority figures has been a significant feature of his writing.

In this excerpt, Hays demonstrates how Styron's language and symbolism make Mannix a mythic figure comparable to Prometheus and Christ.

In this excerpt, Eder extols Styron's deft interweaving of historical occurrences, Southern legend, and his own autobiographical experiences in A Tidewater Morning.

It is futile to stir up the old clichés about "decadence," "Southern tradition," the "Southern model," etc. Styron has better and larger fish to fry. He is, above all, concerned with a basic and timeless issue, though it surely has its place in twentieth-century literature. It is, in brief, the problem of believing, the desperate necessity for having the "courage to be." Almost all of his fiction poses violence against the human power to endure ...

In the following evaluation of A Tidewater Morning, Bausch praises the way in which the three stories compliment each other and together "make one ineffable glow, like facets of the same dark jewel. "

[During The Long March] Mannix has been physically disabled and is about to be socially ostracized (at least by a part of society). But there has been no comparable emotional crisis. That inner compartment of the mind where a man reacts emotionally to the external world has not undergone any great change. Mannix is still the tortured man that he was before the march began, and, more significantly, he is still the deluded man. The same thing cannot be said about Culver, however. His illusions have disappeare...

In this essay, which first appeared as the introduction to the Norwegian edition of The Long March in 1975, Styron discusses the autobiographical experiences that inform his work and recounts his own artistic process of shaping these experiences into the novella.

Below, Leader concludes that, in writing the stories contained within A Tidewater Morning, Styron sought to achieve personal integrity.

In this review of A Tidewater Morning, Kakutani notes Styron's skillful handling of the themes of mortality and evil, but observes that the collection is largely interesting as an index to his earlier works.

Here, Curran finds in Styron's latest collection an essential optimism that underlies the dark and painful fictionalized memories of the author's boyhood.

In this excerpt, West discusses the effect of Styron's revisions of these earlier published stories and notes that Styron's message is that art can redeem an otherwise intolerable existence.

In this excerpt, Finkelstein discusses Styron's novella in the context of the Cold War period, and he notes what he considers Styron's accurate portrayal of the military's complete disregard for the value of human life.