All outward experience of the characters of Clock Without Hands … is conditioned by a sense of moral isolation, a feeling of despair, and baffled search for an identifiable Self. (p. 15)

Mrs. McCullers is most herself as the novelist of inward experience, but in Clock Without Hands she attempts to add another dimension by making her characters stand for the whole South. It is a mistake. The private and the symbolic roles are not fused; the individual and the representative do not merge. The result for the reader is confusion arising from what seems to have been Mrs. McCullers' uncertainty about her objective. There is also a looseness of structure which weakens the novel and which apparently came of her attempt to make it a far bigger book than she finally published.

A novelist who begins, "Death is always the same, but each man dies in his own way...