The second paragraph of Styron's novel mimics the opening of Melville's Moby Dick (1851): "Call me Stingo." In doing so Styron points to the confessional character of the novel and of his fiction in general and directs the reader toward a psychic journey and quest that propels so many great American novels such as Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance (1852), and Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby (1925).