Styron's three interlocked tales re-enact the process of memory and its effects on Paul Whitehurst. In each story he seeks out a moment of epiphany or revelation which encapsulates the depth of his vision of human suffering and history's victimizing powers. In states of near-trance or reverie, Paul recalls scenes from his past in the meditative or confessional mode of many contemporary and traditional Southern novels. The first-person narrator relates his emotional state to the exhausted Tidewater landscape which surrounds him. Styron's style, a slow, lapidary, and mellifluous prose, in its rhetorical power suggests the influences of such Southern writers as William Faulkner and Thomas Wolfe, although these influences have receded in Styron's later work.