Lester takes a fascinating approach to his story by having it focus on a white man's poor understanding of slaves. Through the narrator's difficulty with the moral ambiguities intrinsic to his compromises with slavery, Lester shows how even antislavery whites could be seduced by the slave-owning culture, shows some of the cruelty inherent in one person owning another person as property, and shows how human nature could lead to such terrible cruelty. In so doing he builds on universal aspects of the human condition that are jarring and likely to stir questions in any reader.

As he becomes increasingly familiar with slavery, the narrator finds himself making a series of moral equivocations. Even after a short acquaintance with slavery, he discovers, "In fact I had found it relatively easy to live with slavery, to be waited on hand and foot by silent colored servants."

The courteous...