All The More

Finishing Shadow Country Friday afternoon, I struggled to assess the final third, Mr. Watson's confession, as it were. Opposed to, say, Ahab, Watson always appears to be reacting to perceived injustice. His hand is forced, so to speak, by obstacles to his intrinsically wrought destiny of success, a permanent retort to his humble, abusive, childhood during Reconstruction.

As I noted earlier, I found the Watson section redundant, especially after the crescendo of the prior period where Lucious Watson, scholar and reprobate, is witnessed struggling with the historian's vigilance to discover what remains in terms of his father's (and his own) legacy. That middle section ranks with Faulkner and Warren: bards of the vanquished in this American Dream.