SOURCE: "Signs of a Shift: The Long March," in The Novels of William Styron: From Harmony to History, Louisiana State University Press, 1995, pp. 45-67.

In this excerpt, Cologne-Brookes sees in The Long March signs of a change in Styron's emphases, from his earlier view that literature is a way to achieve harmony in a chaotic world to his later conviction that art is necessarily part of a dialogue with sociohistorical matters.

As Styron's career progressed, the discourse toward harmony was dislodged from setting the underlying direction of his fiction to being one part of a more complex dialogue. The Long March shows signs of this shift, since a conflict emerges between the textual movement toward verbal and social reconciliation and the novella's subject matter. As in Lie Down in Darkness, a struggle is waged between the centripetal and the centrifugal, this time with Tom Culver, as a "critic...