Styron's wrote this novel backwards, beginning with Nat Turner's incarceration in his cell long after his capture and leading up to the rebellion at the end. Such a strategy focuses on Turner's own meditative consciousness and recollections as he tries to reconsider the events and thoughts that led him to his present impasse. Because Styron wrote the novel with a first-person narrator, the reader is totally confined to Turner's way of looking at, judging, and justifying his own actions. Consequently we see him in his various disguises, forever playing a role for an intended audience, a perspective that often blurs the "essential" Turner who has led a violent rebellion. Such a perspective at times threatens to undermine the.....
