Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 2001. [Vol. 7.] Eger Journal of American Studies.(Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 27)

Studies - László Dányi: The Eccentric Against the Mainstream: William Styron, 75

ment of the family members from one another; Helen Loftis, the pious mother, who wastes all her love over her crippled daughter, Maudie; and Milton Loftis, the weak and alcoholic father adoring his daughter, Peyton. The Long March (1953), a novella set on a Carolina marine base, juxtaposes men like Captain Mannix of more than average intelligence against the high-ranked authoritative representatives like Colonel Templeton of the senseless oddities of the military machine. Styron explores the role of moral authority in the military machine which oppresses the individual's desire to be free. Styron's characters revolve around murder, rape and suicide in his Set This House on Fire (1960) which provides a Dostoevskian insight when seeking the source of evil in a universe without either God or the devil. An Italian village after World War 2 accomodates a Southern alcoholic painter, Cass Kinsolving, a naive Southern lawyer, Peter Leverett, and a cruel aristocrat, Mason Flagg, who embodies pure wickedness. Kinsolving's killing Flagg initiates the dilemma over crime, punishment and oblivion. Styron has always had a strong commitment to the issue of slavery, and to the relationship between history and fiction. Stemming from the Weltanschauung of a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant writer in the 1960s, The Confessions of Nat Turner (1967) encapsulates the humiliations, cruelties and idiocy that constituted "the peculiar institution" which scars the common awareness of both blacks and whites. Through depicting Nat Turner's transformation into a self-conscious and visionary leader of blacks Styron discusses the issue of historical fiction versus fictional history. Attempting to conduct the reader in the world of chaos and death, Sophie's Choice (1979) endeavors to speak about the unspeakable and the unimaginable. It introduces the reader to the horrors of the concentration camp machinery of Nazi Germany through the revelations of a Polish Catholic survivor, Sophie, whose tormented soul is unable to come to grips with the memory of having had to spare one of her children in the gas chamber, and who interacts with Nathan, a schizophrenic American Jew helping her in need, and with Stingo, the American Southerner striving to write his first major novel. Finally, 10