Writing Techniques in The Confessions of Nat Turner

This Study Guide consists of approximately 61 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Confessions of Nat Turner.

Writing Techniques in The Confessions of Nat Turner

This Study Guide consists of approximately 61 pages of chapter summaries, quotes, character analysis, themes, and more - everything you need to sharpen your knowledge of The Confessions of Nat Turner.
This section contains 233 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy The Confessions of Nat Turner Study Guide

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 righteousness of the very rebellion itself, a position not lost on several critics of the novel. Styron deepens Turner's confessions with dreams, visions, hallucinations, haunting images, and the Biblical rhetoric...

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This section contains 233 words
(approx. 1 page at 400 words per page)
Buy The Confessions of Nat Turner Study Guide
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