Lie Down in Darkness discussion

I read this dark book recently, when I noticed William Styron is the same author who wrote, "Sophie's Choice," which I read in either high school or college. I was not prepared for how dense this book is. This is not an easy read, you will not blow through it in a couple of days. It requires a commitment and a great deal of focus to finish it.


The story is set in the 1950's in Virginia, and weaves around a single day in which a dysfunctional family must deal with burying their daughter who committed suicide. How Styron was able to tie landscape descriptions and make it relevant to a situation was fascinating. This book was almost like reading an extensive poem. I loved the symbolism, including how Peyton, the daughter, had to release her “wingless birds” into flight by dying, her only escape of misery and madness. The racial overtones were difficult to read throughout the book, and the ending stumped me. Was the entire religious scene poking fun at Southern simple religion, or was he trying to show that these people were the only ones who had hope, even though their sense of hope was directed at a single person?

Peyton accurately describes her mother as “soul-less” and her father as being weak. Both descriptions are absolutely true. Helen, the mother, is also humorless, depressed, power hungry, as she finally succeeds in having her husband grovel to her, and incapable of love. Milton, the father, is a pathetic and weak drunk who allows shallow Dolly, his mistress, to insert herself into his life, only because her complete adoration of him is so satisfying, while Dolly helps to steer the family on their downward spiral. His character could have drawn sympathy from the reader, until the wedding scene in which he publicly gropes Peyton in front of her mother and husband. Peyton is the real victim here: her father is constantly soffocating and groping her out of desperation; instead of her mother advocating for Peyton, she hates her youth and beauty, as well as the attention from which she feels deprived. Helen continues to berate Peyton for being a drunk and a whore, until Peyton finally succumbs and becomes a drunk and a whore. She punishes herself by being promiscuous and destroys the only possible nurturing relationship she has with her husband, Harry. In the end Peyton copes with adulthood in the same dysfunctional way her parents did: by becoming a complete alcoholic like her father, and by mentally torturing the people she loves, like her mother.

The story is a tragedy in the truest sense, very dark and sad to read. Styron is brilliant with his beautiful prose and suspenseful ending.

I absolutely loved this book and just finished and reviewed it a day or two ago.

Like you, I had questions about the ending, but these were my half-formed thoughts:

1. It has an emotional/aesthetic function of "cslming things down." The way this novel is structured, it would have been unfitting and cheap for Styron to build to a dramatic emotional damnation point and leave us there, but it would have been a cop out to restore some calming normality to the living characters.

So we're left with the characters who have snaked in and out of the novel and who were very taken with Peyton going from interjecting thoughts about "poor Peyton" amidst the other events to giving themselves over to the spiritual event and moving forward--but not with any sense of triumph, rather in doing something quite simpleminded (at least, I believe, in Styron's opinion).

2. The seemingly exaggerated and simpleminded spiritual experience the black worshippers have is the most extreme opposite imaginable to the life experiences of the major characters in the novel. With them, we have the isolation, obsessions, internal turbulence of lives destined to "lie down in darkness." The novel automatically raises the question of whether Styron is portraying such as the nature of human existence or as the fate of a handful of eccentric characters in a tragic tale. I think that Styron refuses to answer that question with this ending. It shows us an example of people giving themselves over to group identity and rejoicing it, fixing on a simple point of salvation, and basically finding peace by not thinking, trusting in the religion that has failed the novel's major characters--even the minister--all along. And I think that even religious readers would find their behavior simplistic and silly.

So this is what we're given as an answer/alternative to all of that inner turbulence. It's as if Styron is saying that, yes, the lives of simpler people move on happily beyond the frustrated, turbulent lives of the characters. I see importance in little details--like having the lost little girl drift simply in with Stonewall and the adult women until her mother happens upon her. The mother sits down with the family, and these passing acquaintances enjoy the festivities together harmoniously and with no drama as if they were all old friends and as if nothing has really happened. Well, that's certainly simple living compared to the possessive struggles that keep a nuclear family like the Loftises from even getting through Christmas dinner together without finding drama and conflict in everything. But surely the mentality among the peaceable black celebrants seems far too simple to almost any reader.

Styron isn't saying whether the Loftises represent the human condition in which all "lie down in darkness," but he isn't leaving us with a "life-goes-on" alternative that we can buy into or be at peace with either. I thought perhaps the ending was meant to be unsatisfying in that way. I found it very unsatisfying, felt relatively certain that most other readers would agree, and felt equally certain that an author who wrote a novel this powerful and took it through several drafts over a few years would know that and must have intended it that way.

I almost stopped reading this book about halfway through due to the depressing subject matter. I was hoping that something would occur that would cause me to sit bolt upright and renew my interest in the book but that never happened. One thing of note. I caught a few words of F. Scott Fitzgerald in the text, specifically, "borne back ceaselessly" and that rather disturbed me. Isn't that plagarism? All in all, I enjoyed the book but early on I grew weary of "Helen" and felt I wanted to slap her upside the head. Much to my surprise, " Bunny" must of had the same idea and physically chokes Helen in front of the minister. Yikes!