Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

If William Styron has done us a disservice it's that he's unleashed upon America the concept of political correctness. The backlash against this book, to a large extent, is what started it all. Some of the criticism is on-target, but much is unfair. Slaves typically have been depicted in one of two ways: as the simple-minded shuffling watermelon-eating darkie, or as the noble African struggling valiantly against the tyrannical white plantation. One depiction is overtly racist, and the secondly is unrealistically romantic (and in it's own way demeaning). What Styron gives us is "none of the above". What he tries to depict is a reality that is often overlooked or not acknowledged: that chattel slavery in the American South was a ruthlessly and crushingly effective system; so effective that throughout its history (from the 1600's through the Emancipation Proclamation) there were only two armed rebellions. Slavery was obviously a great evil; it is equally obvious that as a mechanism for suppressing the enslaved it was remarkably effective. It follows that this mechanism will have an effect on the suppressed. Chattel slavery was, in many cases, a "breaker of spirits". The depiction of the slaves in this book is not always positive. What Styron tries to show (sometimes successfully) is that slavery was a heavy weight, and that the slaves who bore this weight were not always noble. This is what many readers have found offensive, and why the book has been labeled "racist". This was not my impression (my background: I'm an African American raised in Texas.) This is a novel full of ugliness and negative characters. There is not a single fully sympathetic character in the entire book, black or white. In this way, it is an exploration of the evil of slavery. This novel is not a history lesson; and in that many readers accept the fiction as fact Styron might have done us an additional disservice. Styron himself acknowledges this in the forward of the recent addition. The controversy surrounding Confessions is not what it once was, but I'd encourage anyone who has deliberately avoided the book because they've been told it is racist to read it and decide for yourself.