SOURCE: "The Long March: The Expansive Hero in a Closed World," in Critique, Vol. IX, No. 3, Winter, 1967, pp. 103-12.

Below, Nigro argues that The Long March is about the degeneration of a classical hero type into an "anti-hero" due to the corruption of the military. The critic also suggests that the military is symbolic of American society where, he argues, there is no place for the heroic personality.

A close examination of [The Long March] reveals that Styron has written a fable in which a few concrete images and symbols tell at least three related tales: the story of a forced march in a Marine camp, which demonstrates Styron's belief "that military life corrupts and we would be a lot better off without it" [William Styron, "If You Write for Television . . ." New Republic CXL VI (April 1959), 16]; the story of the American experience in which the individual's dream of...