[The] feeling of war as the condition of life pervades all of Styron's works: in Lie Down in Darkness, Peyton Loftis commits suicide on the day the bomb is dropped on Nagasaki; in Set This House on Fire Cass Kinsolving traces the beginning of his self-destructive striving to his experiences in World War II, which drove him to the psychiatric ward. And even The Confessions of Nat Turner, although set a full century earlier, is informed by the spirit of the battlefield.

Besides being inescapable, war is outrageously unreasonable. The enemy is undefined; heroic action becomes clownish and self-destructive…. What Styron shows in his most convincing fiction is, first, that beneath the calm and affluent exterior of modern life lies a violent potential, and, second, that this violence has a capricious life of its own and erupts as a senseless surprise, often in the form of an accident...