[The story of revenge related by Andrew Lytle in The Long Night is based on oral tales told in the Cumberland.] But when, in the cold light of morning, the teller faces the blank, white page, alone, with no friend present and no glass in the hand, all is different. The greatest difference is that now he is to freeze the tale in the act of telling. That is the terrible fact.

What does Andrew Lytle do to, for, with, the tale that had lived in voices? What, that is, beyond his own special narrative élan?

First, he gives it a world. In the other tellings the tale had not needed a world. The world had been solidly there in the consciousness, in the blood, even, of the listeners. But once a tale gets frozen on paper, what the reader knows or does not know about the world of the tale, in consciousness or bloodstream, is no longer relevant. In a sense, the reader is now an abstraction. He is not there when the telling—i.e., the writing—takes place. The tale must now "be" its own world as well as what happens in that world, and the "being" of this world is not mere information about geography, sociology, and history, but, ultimately, an aspect of form. Form is merely a complex of dynamic relations, and the relations between scene (world) on one hand and action and character on the other, are fundamental and germinal.

Effortlessly, as naturally as breath is drawn, as secretly as Pleasant McIvor ever stalked the appointed victim, the author of The Long Night creates his world. He never "describes" the world, he is merely aware of it. This is not to say that description does not appear. It does. (pp. 22-3)

Ordinarily, however, description appears in terms special to that world, opening some fuller or deeper glimpse into the world. On the first page, as the simplest kind of example, dawn light lies upon the "puncheon floor"—because the floor is of puncheons. In the next sentence, the fire curls over the "back stick into the dark suck of the chimney's mouth." True, the "dark suck of the chimney's mouth" is description, vivid with the word "suck," but the key to the world is in the innocent phrase "back stick"—instead of "back log."… Here is the glimpse of a world … just two jumps and a spit this side of the frontier.

It is such glimpses, casual but profound, that give the texture of the world in which the action occurs, but the author has used more radical measures to create a human context for the action. Bit by bit, the reader's attention is shifted from the story of the avenger, Pleasant McIvor, to the common, daylight life of the community, the life that the secret members of the gang must live with their families and friends. Again and again, we enter that common life. It is a life of affection, pathos, and humor intertwined with the secret evil, but rendered with full fidelity to those normal interests and values. (pp. 23-4)

In that world of common life, the members of the gang wait for the moment when the avenger will again emerge from his shadows. And our knowledge and suspense gives an image of, and empathy for, the growing dread of the guilty as they realize, death by death, the doom hanging over them. In a sense, they are not, after all, villains. They are merely men, certainly no better than they should be, but trapped somehow in their destiny. Whose side are we on? This doubleness of view, and the irony it entails, is a fundamental fact of the story as it appears in the novel.

If the novelist has undertaken to create a world and a human context for the deeds of vengeance, the main change from the original tale is in the nature of the avenger. In the tale, once he is in the grip of his obsession, he becomes, simply, his "role." This is all the tale demands, and from the avenger's side of the action, the only variety possible will lie in the method and circumstances of the killing. If, in the tale, he ceases his pursuit of the guilty, it is only because he has grown old. The novelist, however, cannot settle for this. He wants a deeper drama. So he lets the Civil War fall across the action. (pp. 26-7)

[The] war provides the perfect cover for [Pleasant's] operations, for as a soldier in the vast namelessness of the army, he can stalk his prey with impunity. But bit by bit, the great public bloodletting drains him of his private thirst for blood, the great public mania undermines his private mania. He finds that he can no longer sink himself in his role, even if he conceives of himself as merely God's hand exacting justice. He finds that he is human, after all. He is capable of friendship, and in the end he finds that friendship is a trap; in pursuing his private war he causes the death of his friend in the public war. He is caught up in human loyalties—to his friend and to the men with whom he marches. He has, however, discovered his humanity too late. The long night will never end. (p. 27)

[Pleasant's desertion is the proper solution for the novel.] But in working it out, the novelist involves himself, it must be put on the record, in certain technical difficulties. In the sequence leading up to the Battle of Shiloh, we lose Pleasant, the focus of interest shifts, becomes generalized and diffuse, and when we rediscover him in the battle, something has been lost and is never, perhaps, completely recovered. No, that is not true. It is recovered, but only at the last minute, in the splendid conclusion.

This technical defect does not, in one sense, matter—nor do certain more minor ones. The conception of the story is firm, but the real reason such a defect does not matter is the spirit of the work. We are not reading a realistic novel. The work is full of realistic effects, the details of a real world and real people, but the whole is more like a ballad than a novel—a quintessential poetry of action, pathos, humor, and doom, to be read innocently, in its own terms, in its perspective of distance and a climate of feeling. It is strangely like a dream, springing from a certain society, from a certain historical moment—not a record, but a dream, the paradoxical dream of that society's, that historical moment's, view of itself.

There is no book quite like The Long Night, and there will never be another quite like it. It says something about the world of the South not said elsewhere, and something that is true. But more importantly, it offers its own special fascination and its own special pleasure. At least, that is what I always find when I come back to it, the fascination, the pleasure. (p. 28)