56 pages • 1 hour read
William StyronThe Confessions of Nat Turner
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1967A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
Animals
When Nat meets Jonathan Cobb, he is skinning rabbits. These animals, which he catches and from which Marse Samuel and Joseph Travis make money, give Nat a sense of ingenuity and control. Across the novel, Nat looks dismissively at animals like rabbits, and he also uses the term “animal” to speak dismissively of other enslaved people who he sees as below him.
One day, with Margaret Whitehead, he kicks a crushed turtle into a ditch. Margaret, who was hoping to save the turtle, feels intense pity for the turtle; Nat tells her that “they that doesn’t holler doesn’t hurt” (359). Part of what haunts Nat about Margaret is her awareness to “suffering things” (359), to animals that cannot speak for themselves. Although Nat’s mission is an effort to speak out against suffering, it also calls for violence. This demonstrates a different moral ethic than that which Margaret stands for, which is paternalistic care for those lesser than oneself.
Ironically, when Nat dies, his own body is “skinned,” and doctors make “grease of the flesh” (415). In other words, they deliberately treat Nat as an animal as if to fulfill Nat’s worst suspicion that black people are “brainless born, brainlessly seeking” (27) wellness like flies. Nat fears that the flies’ “buzzing eternally between heaven and oblivion in a pure agony of mindless twitching” (27) is a symbol of black destiny, and the doctors’ treatment of him, in death, seems an effort to affirm that idea. Yet this deliberate move also calls attention to the effort required to dehumanize: this is not a natural process, but one done out of cruelty, intended to intensify suffering.
Windows
Nat’s cell, which contrasts deeply with his outdoor life and “sanctuary” at Joseph Travis’s farm, is enclosed so that he can only see and hear limited visions and voices from the outside. That which he does see, through his window, he describes in vivid detail. This sense of close observation is characteristic, for Nat, but as he looks at his life, the idea of a “window” comes out in his storytelling, too.
As Nat reflects upon his life, he provides his reader with small “windows” into his past. Because these memories are all his, they are all connected, though they can also be enclosed by time boundaries (beginnings and ends). In this way, the space of the mind begins to reflect the window: each vision is a suggestion of everything beyond it. The sounds—of Hark in the next room, of a woman crying in the distance—similarly cement the impression that Nat is connected to the world beyond, even if those connections are not obvious.
When Nat is dehumanized in death, and when others are buried, just like his grandmother, their bodies decompose—they, too, are limited by boundaries of life and death. Yet Styron uses the idea of windows to suggest connections between incidents across time, connections that provide an opportunity of hope that, for example, Nat’s rebellion will be attached to and have implications for future lives and actions.
Visions
Nat believes in the power of his visions to demonstrate his destiny. Styron’s narrative, too, invests in the power of visions—specifically, the vision of the mysterious white tower in Parts 1 and 4—to communicate ideas about life and its mysteries in Nat’s life. That particular vision comes to Nat many times, across many years, in a “haunting and recurrent way” (6). It reminds him that mysteries should not be too deeply questioned, even though his questioning nature seems predisposed to ask.
Nat experiences visions first when he is 14 years old and grows deeply ill. As the Turner family cares for him with a strangely close degree of intimacy, Nat’s mind goes “into crazed visions” (164). He has more visions, as he grows older, and many of them are sexual and masturbatory. But Nat has his first religious vision, the vision of his mission, in 1825, just a few years before his rebellion.
These true, religious visions happen in nature, removed from other people. They often connect to intense physical sensations—brushfires, for example—that lead Nat to a delirium that his reader questions even as he feels it is divinely inspired. By deciding that Nat should explain his dreams vividly, Styron also welcomes readers to doubt their authenticity, to see Nat’s motivation skeptically. Is his vision entirely religious, or is it more bodily, physical, and personal? Is rebellion and religion divine, or is it produced from the deep, even physical, desires of men in suffering? By focusing Nat’s experiences around his vision, Styron allows his narrator to decide the source of Nat’s zeal with a measure of cynicism.
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By William Styron
