SOURCE: "William Styron's Long March: Absurdity and Authority," in The Western Humanities Review, Vol. XV, 1961, pp. 267-72.

In the following excerpt, McNamara finds that the plot, structure, and metaphors of Styron's novella demonstrate the author's point that both acceptance of and obedience to authority are necessary and that protest is hopeless.

All works of art reflect and echo the tenor of their time. This is inescapable. There is a certain patterning, a certain cadence of words, a tonal quality which makes a work uniquely itself, and strangely of its time.

Such a work is William Styron's novella, The Long March, called "one of the two or three distinguished novellettes of the last thirty years" by John Aldridge, but otherwise curiously ignored by the critics. I say "curiously" because the pattern of the work so closely reflects the tenor of our own time. This may not be evident after...