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Are the Children Sick? Throughout the novel, the air of damnation is pervasive, though the odor is more of the stage than the sulphur pit. Styron himself prates endlessly about the sickness of the age. and Mason and Cass are obviously two of its sickest children. But they—and all the other characters, including an entire film troupe—are in a puppet show rather than a morality play. They dance to Author Styron's rhetoric, and rhetoric is all too often stillborn emotion.
Styron's images of evil, ranging from the death agonies of a run-over dog to the pitiless vandalizing of a sharecropper's hut, are vivid but despairingly un-Christian and even un-Greek in their fatalism. True, the Greek tragic chorus keens over man's fate, but not because the gods are blind—only because the hero is.